


Chronicles of the Fae Realms

by Crystalquill, sopasofi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Action, Adventure, Deals, Fantasy, Magic, Multi, Urban Fantasy, fae
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25007170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crystalquill/pseuds/Crystalquill, https://archiveofourown.org/users/sopasofi/pseuds/sopasofi
Summary: Silvana just wanted to finish a homework assignment, not step into the uncomfortable truth that magical creatures, known as fae, exist and have been trapped for centuries, desperate for escape.And yet, if she wants to get rid of the one that has possessed her, she must do exactly that. Accompanied by an eclectic group of people she meets, she unearths the history about these elusive beings and their imprisonment.
Relationships: Other Relationship Tags to Be Added
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first original story! I'm so excited for it!  
> Updates the 25th of every month!

Silvana walks into class wanting to set the building on fire but politely nods at the teacher in greeting instead. She walks towards the front row of seats and pulls out her notebook slightly rougher than she intended to, but she finds there's nothing in her strong enough to care. She grabs one of her pencils and slowly starts to carve a wedge into it with her nail, a habit she hasn't been able to kick despite the fact that it usually wrecks her thumbnail. 

"Bad morning?" is Jacobo's greeting as he sets his backpack on the back of his chair, pulling out his collection of almost-broken pens he seems so fond of. His shirt looks like he tried to make it out of a white tablecloth and decided not to cut the excess fabric at all, for how loose it hangs around him. At least his jeans don't have stains in them, this time.

"Yes, unfortunately," curtly answers Silvana, watching the lecture hall slowly fill up with students while the teacher sets another of her unending presentations up on the podium at the front. Labour law class has not been and probably never will be one of Silvana's favorites, but she needs the class in order to graduate, so she will grit her teeth and bear it. 

Jacobo gets into his chair and sets it uncomfortably close into Silvana's personal space, but she has found that rebuking him does nothing, as inevitably during class his swivel chair will just happen to roll closer and closer to hers. She thus says nothing and opens her notebook. 

At that moment she feels a stare in the back of her head and breathes in deeply. "Jacobo, could you please do me a favor and check if Parches is staring at me again?"

"... Yup, he's definitely looking," he responds after a moment, a note of distaste in his voice. "Like, really looking. And smiling. What a jerk." 

Silvana risks a glance back and finds Parches. He's reclining back in his chair so far it seems like it might fall backward at any minute. His black boots are on the table, despite that the teacher had scolded him about it multiple times, and eventually given up on it. His arms are behind his head, intentionally flexing to show off a wolf tattoo on his biceps. Parches is not actually his name, that being Pedro, but Silvana gave him that nickname for the amount of rock band patches sewn on his black leather jacket. 

Parches _very obviously_ smirks and licks his lips while maintaining direct eye contact with her. Silvana wants to throw something at him but restrains herself at the last second. 

"Why can't he just leave you alone?" complains Jacobo, opening his notebook to the page where his notes are, as pristine as always. 

"Because I'm fun to annoy and he's already bedded all the prettier girls than me in this class," she answers, and Jacobo snickers behind his hand. Silvana can't help the little satisfied smirk that peeks from her lips even though she knows those types of comments are unbecoming of her. 

The teacher finally greets the class and with that, Silvana focuses back on her studies. It’s an endless rote of taking notes and listening that passes in a grey blur, as does every single day. There’s a headache slowly forming while the teacher starts to wrap up her lecture.

"Psst." Jacobo nudges her elbow to get her attention. "Hey, Silvie."

"What?" 

"I and a group of friends are going to go drinking after class ends. Wanna come with?" 

"I'll have to check my planner," she answers, mentally rifling through her excuses. It's not that she doesn't like talking to Jacobo. He’s interesting company, but she can't afford to lag behind her studies at all. She has her day planned down to the minute and she won't let a random get-together wreck her schedule.

"I'll give you homework for next week," the teacher announces at the end of the class and at least half the class groans out loud. "Don't make those faces, it's not long and you can do it in groups if you want to."

Silvana doesn't bother asking Jacobo if he'd do the homework with her. "When are you free?"

"Well I guess I was drinking with friends after this, but it looks my plans got canceled," he grumbles, putting away his things. "Should we go to the Creperia to study?" 

"And climb up to Mordor? No thank you," Silvana responds, tucking her notebook in its appropriate place inside her backpack. "We should go to the Crepes & Waffles nearby, less will-defying stairs of hell that way."

"Oh come on, the stairs aren't that bad," he says, shrugging his backpack on. 

"There is a _reason_ the entire student body calls those stairs Mordor," she quips at him, absentmindedly shoving her pen behind her ear. "We should hurry before the dinner crowd takes all the tables–"

"Hey! Hey! Can I work with both of you?" 

Silvana turns around and blinks. Standing there is a girl she'd guess to be eighteen, the same age as her. Her dark, straight hair is bound into a messy-looking topknot using what looks to be a pair of sharpies. She is wearing a black pencil skirt that has a rather interesting pattern on it, that on the second inspection turns out to be pieces of broken rulers artfully stuck onto the fabric.

"...Are those the clips that were on the teacher's table?" asks Silvana, pointing at the girl’s earrings. 

"Yeah, but don't worry, I asked for them!" she grins, her makeshift earrings glinting in the light, just like the spark of happiness in her honey-colored eyes. "Pleaaaaaase let me be in your group!" 

“Why?” asks Jacobo, dumbfounded, as he blinks at her. 

“Cuz’ I _really_ don’t like this class but I thought it would be a good idea to take it and I forgot to drop out of it while I still could so now I can’t have it bringing down my average,” she says in a single breath and shoots the biggest smile Silvana has ever seen. “So, please?”

“Uuuh, ok?” says Jacobo. 

Silvana whirls to murder-glare Jacobo, while Silvana cheers and starts to prattle a mile a minute in the background.

Jacobo shoots a panicked look back and mouths ‘I fucked up’. 

"I'm also out of a group, could I join?" says a voice behind Silvana and she freezes. 

She turns around slowly, praying that her ears somehow deceive her, but standing behind her with a smug smirk, is Parches himself. 

"Sure!" answers Weird Girl smiling from ear to ear. "I heard you were both planning to study today, so let's study at my house! C'mon!" 

Weird Girl then grabs Jacobo's wrist and, _still_ chattering away, drags him with her towards the university parking lot. 

"Hello there, beautiful," Parches says. He then puts his arm around Silvana's shoulders and starts walking, shoving her forward with him. He smells like a combination of cigarettes, Tequila and musky cologne. "Nice to finally talk to you."

Silvana stumbles along, surprised by his strength. She tries to shrug off his arm, but he manages to keep it there.

"You really do like giving the cold shoulder treatment, huh?" Parches says, his nose piercing glinting in the slowly darkening sky. "C'mon why won't you talk to me?"

"Because I don't particularly enjoy getting distracted from my studies," she answers, taking calming breaths to keep herself from making a scene. 

"Wow, you really do speak like royalty," he snickers as they enter the parking lot. "I should be calling you Princess."

"I would you rather call me by name," Silvana curtly answers, trying her best to ignore him. She finally spots Jacobo, who's awkwardly getting into the backseat of a car that Silvana assumes is Weird Girl's. 

Parches laughs. "Whatever you say, your Highness." 

He finally lets Silvana go. For a second she considers simply turning around and walking away, but Jacobo is looking regretful in the backseat and it would be terribly impolite to leave him behind. 

Silvana sighs, grits her teeth, and very pointedly gets on the front of the car so Parches can’t sit beside her. 

“I forgot to ask for your names!” Weird Girl says, starting the car. “My names’ Eliana, but call me Eli! Nice to meet you all!”

“Name’s Pedro,” drawls Parches, while he pulls a stick of bubblegum out of his pocket and winks at the rearview mirror. 

Silvana looks away, angry at herself for having been caught glaring holes into him.

“Uh, I’m Jacobo,” he says and settles in the backseat, keeping half an eye on Parches, who’s loudly popping bubbles. 

“Silvana,” she answers, buckling her seatbelt.

“So, Silvie!” Weird Girl– Eli, begins leaving the university grounds and deftly avoiding a cluster of potholes. 

“Could you please not call her Silvie?” Jacobo interjects, glaring at Eli. 

“Please call me by my full name,” confirms Silvana, shooting a grateful look to Jacobo through the rearview mirror. He smiles in return. 

“But I heard him call you like that!” Eli rebukes playfully as they arrive at the main roads and immediately get stuck in traffic. “Wait, is it like a pet name or something? Are you guys together?”

“No,” Silvana answers sharply while Jacobo splutters in the backseat. “Only friends get to call me that and you’re a complete stranger.” 

“So if I become your friend, I can call you that? Cool!” Eli answers and Silvana wants to scream because she’s _completely missing the point_. “First step of becoming friends: getting to know each other! I’m studying Visual Arts! What about all of you?” 

“We’re all in the Business Administration course,” promptly responds Silvana. “In fact, I wanted to ask you, how come you ended up taking labor law if you’re in the Visual Arts course?” 

“I needed two more credits and thought this class looked interesting so I signed up for it!” she answers, stopping at a red light. “And also it was four am and I had the mother of all sugar rushes so that might have been part of the reason.” 

Silvana slowly blinks at her in silence, mystified that such a person could exist. An air-headed bizarro of a human being that despite all of that managed to get into the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, one of the best universities in the entire country. Such a fact defies logical principles, she thinks. 

“Oh fuck!” shouts Eli and everybody in the car jumps. “I forgot my house is getting repairs! It’s gonna be like a sawdust desert in there, we can’t study like that!”

Silvana turns to stare at her uncomprehendingly and wishes she could imitate her cat and scratch Eli’s face to express her discontent.

“What if we study at my house then?” proposes Parches. 

‘Over my dead body,’ Silvana thinks. 

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Silvana says, resolutely ignoring Parches’ fake-wounded noise. “ _My_ apartment is a few streets from here. It should be a twenty-minute ride, at most.”

"Ooooh, that's a good idea!" Eli says, smiling widely. "Where should I turn?" 

Silvana simply gives her directions while Parches and Jacobo get into an argument in the backseat. She's not entirely sure what the argument is about since Eli keeps trying to make conversation and occasionally forgets the directions Silvana just told her. Still, she wants to shout with relief once they arrive at her street. 

She tries to step out of the car, but the security lock doesn't want to open. She tries to tug on the handle tighter, scratches at the lock and yet it still remains shut.

"Let me!" Eli says, reaching into the glove compartment for a screwdriver and pries the lock open. "My car’s a bit finicky, but good ol' Chavo still works like a charm!" 

Silvana ignores her and steps out of the red car, the dusk illuminating her apartment building. It's a brick building tucked in a corner, in front of a park. She walks towards the entrance and nods at the security guard who unlocks the door of the building for her. 

The building is old and only has four floors, but it's well maintained. It doesn't even have an elevator, but that doesn't bother Silvana at all since her apartment is on the second floor. 

She unlocks her front door. Her apartment is on the smaller side, but she's never been one to need much space. Her living room consists of a white couch and a lamp facing a bookshelf. She didn't bother buying a tv, she didn't need it. Her kitchen is in the same space as her living room, a collection of modern white cabinets and silvery appliances. The door to her bedroom is opposite the kitchen, on the other side of the living room.

In that moment _Teacup_ pads over to Silvana to weave herself around her legs, mewing for food. Silvana smiles and gently picks her up, cradling her in her arms. She starts to purr while Silvana expertly grabs the food bag out of her cupboard, going through the motions of quickly setting out her little plate on the floor with only one hand.

"Please, seat yourselves on the couch," Silvana says, washing her hands in the sink. "Do you prefer water, juice, or soda?" 

"Water, Silvie."

"Water for me tooooooo!"

"Your juice, Princess."

She nods and begins preparing the beverages and pouring the last of her pistachios in a bowl, carefully carrying it to the living room. Before she leaves, she sets water to boil in a pot for her tea.

"You have a super cute apartment, by the way!" Eli compliments, taking her soda from the living room table. “As an artist, I must say that the silver-white-blue combination is A+!”

"Thank you," Silvana graciously accepts the compliment with a small smile.

She then sits down and finally takes off her backpack, retrieving her pencil case and notebook. "I think we should first focus on making an outline of how this exercise is going to go–"

"Slow down, Your Highness," Parches says, taking off his leather jacket and throwing it on the floor. "Where's the hospitality?"

"I already gave you a drink," Silvana points out monotonically. "We should probably split the assignment–"

"But we hardly know each other!" he ribs, reaching over to place a hand on Silvana's shoulder. "Open up a bit!"

"Okay, that's it!" Jacobo says, reaching over to shove Parches' hand off of Silvana's shoulder. "What the fuck is wrong with you?!? 

"What's the problem?" drawls Parches with a dangerous smile.

"You! You're the fucking problem!" Jacobo says, standing up and gesturing wildly. "You can't just waltz in and start to mess with Silvie just because you think you have the right to do whatever you want!"

"I don't?" Parches says, standing up from the couch, drawing himself up to full height. The muscle shirt he has underneath makes his biceps stand out starkly.

"No! You don't!" Jacobo shouts, getting closer and closer as Parches' smile gets bigger and bigger. "So either learn some basic human decency or leave!"

Silvana reaches for an encyclopedia that she left lying beside her couch, getting ready to swing it. From the corner of her eye, she sees that Eli has fished her phone from her pocket ready to call... who, Silvana isn't sure. 

When her fingers brush the spine of the heavy, old book, she chances a look at Parches and freezes. 

There are thick, spidering veins around his eyes. His teeth have taken a reddish hue as if he’d gotten blood of them. 

For a wild second, Silvana believes she's hallucinating. 

Then Parches reaches forward and slams Jacobo's face into the coffee table so hard the wood cracks and splinters. 

Silvana shrieks and throws the book on reflex. It crashes against Parches' chest with a heavy thunk, but he doesn't seem to feel it, instead turning to look at Silvana with a savage grin and unnerving eyes. 

"TAKE A GODDAM CHILL PILL MOTHERFUCKER," shouts Eli, where she's dragging Jacobo's ragdoll of a body away from the fighting, phone already against her ear. "SHIT, FUCK, YES FUCK HI THERE'S A PROBLEM BECAUSE THIS PSYCHO JUST BASHED A TABLE IN WITH MY FRIEND'S HEAD!"

"Are you angry, Princess?" Parches asks, calmly walking over towards her and Silvana lunges towards her kitchen, narrowly missing an attempt to grab her shirt. 

She takes one of her kitchen knives and holds it like a sword, her shaking hands betraying her. "Don't! Don't you dare come any closer!" He laughs in her face and she shouts "I mean it! DON'T GET ANY CLOSER!"

"You really think a little knife is going to stop me? You're far too weak to do anything," he smiles and fear and panic and _rage_ climb up Silvana's throat, warm tears spill out of her eyes and her hand grabs the handle of her pot. She flings boiling water right into his face. 

He screams and lunges for her. In her panic she drops the knife and throws herself aside, into her cabinets. 

"SILVANA, WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR ADDRESS!" screeches Eli in the background. 

Silvana screams it back and only has a few moments to register her bruises before a screeching sound rakes her ears. 

She turns to see Parches somehow pulling his arms out from the wall, a mess of broken brick spilling onto the stovetop and clanging all the way down to the floor.

He growls an inhuman, raking attempt at a word that Silvana doesn't recognize, and yet it draws a savage shiver from her spine. 

Another growl reverberates through her bones before he yanks himself out in a cloud of pulverized wall, red veins standing starkly over his pale skin.

There's a metal pipe in his hands now, the tip of it bent the same way a paperclips’ is when you twist it with your hands. The flame on the stovetop flickers out. 

Parches is smiling so wide it looks like it hurts, his gums on full display and slowly leaking blood. He swings at her cabinets, breaking them into pieces while everything inside spills out like the organs out of a human body. A string of cheerful, manic curses slips past his lips, not stopping even when his throat gargles with spilled blood. He breaks the granite countertop in half, reveling in destruction, and then freezes. 

"Get over here!" says Eli, from the open door of Silvana’s bedroom. "Quick!" 

Silvana turns around to slip into her room.

"Ah, that's not going to work!" A yowl of pain strikes a deep realization in Silvana and she whirls around to see _Teacup_ hissing, struggling to get free, Parches' hand around her neck. 

"No!" rips out of Silvana's lungs, her voice wavering. "Let her go!"

"I will," says Parches. His face looks slack and tight in all the wrong places, the hand not holding _Teacup_ swinging as if it's dead. His head even tilts and sways around as if he'd given up on controlling it. "But I want something in exchange."

"What–" Silvana gulps, swallows around the dryness of her throat. "What do you want?"

"Your anger," and he smiles, his skin taut and red, water-burnt blisters stretching grotesquely. 

"You want my anger?" says Silvana, a deafening whisper of a buzz stretching between her ears. "YOU WANT MY ANGER?!? LET HER GO YOU WASTE OF A HUMAN BEING!"

The fingers around _Teacup_ ’s neck go slack and she bolts towards the safe recesses of Silvana’s room, ghosting around Silvana's legs. 

"May your will prosper," Parches says, fishing out a lighter from his pocket. His left hand is shaking, but his right holds the lighter almost elegantly. 

That's when Silvana becomes aware of the smell of gas, the pipe Parches broke being the probable source and that a fire could–

Silvana springs back and closes the door with a slam. 

"What happened?!?" says Eli.

Turning around to face a wild-eyed Eli cradling Jacobo's limp form, looking at the terrified bundle that is _Teacup_ near her feet, Silvana opens her mouth to answer.

Then all she knows is the heat of fire and the screams and the glint of glass shattering, and a delighted laugh reverberating in her head before the street rushes out to meet her.


	2. Chapter 2

Silvana hasn't talked since she woke up. It's kind of freaking Eli out. Well, not that she wasn't freaked out _before_ , but still! It's been _three days_ and she won't even respond to her parents! Eli decides enough's enough and carefully gets up from her bed. 

The stitches in her back twinge and the cold of the white, shiny tile floor seeps through her feet. She stands up shakily, smoothing out the papery hospital gown the best she can, trying to run her fingers through her tangled hair to get it to lay straight again. It doesn't work, at all, but what can she do? Her stitches haven't healed enough to let her wash her hair without bitching the entire time. Anyway, it's fine. She's sure Silvana's parent’s probably won’t mind her visit much.

She takes careful steps and crosses the room, walking carefully under the harsh artificial lighting. She passes by two empty beds before she reaches the curtained-off one that's Silvana's. The voices of Silvana’s parents slowly get louder and louder until Eli's right beside them. 

"Knock knock!" Eli says, knocking on the metal poles that hold up the curtains. "Can I come in?"

"Yes, you may," says an elegant voice and Eli opens the curtain to slip inside. 

"Whoa, I know now where Silvana got the whole aristocratic vibe from!" says Eli once she gets a look Silvana’s mother. “Seriously, you look like a freaking modern empress! So cool!” 

She’s is wearing a custom-fit grey suit with amethyst earrings and necklace, with a color-coordinated purple handkerchief poking out from her breast pocket. Her regal black-eyed stare zeroes in on Eli and she feels like she's getting x-rayed for being suspected of carrying drugs. 

“Helloooo! I’m Eli, your daughter’s partner in getting-exploded-out-a-window nonsense,” she greets, scooting over a chair and settling into it. “Nice to meetcha!” 

“And hello there Silvaaaana!” Eli greets and raises her arm to give a wave before she regrets it, wincing through the pain in her back. “Oof, ow. Ok, I’m not doing that again.”

Silvana just stares at her, dark circles under her grey eyes, her skin a few shades paler than it should be, which, to be honest, had to be some kind of record ‘cuz she was pale as  _ fuck _ even before this. Silvana looks away, her dark hair falling like some kind of curtain between them. Her hair’s pretty oily if Eli’s honest, but her own’s not much better so she has absolutely no room to judge. 

“My name is Tania,” she says, pulling Eli’s attention away to the hand Tania, waiting to be shaken. “I haven’t had the opportunity to greet you. Are you alright?”

“Uh? Oh, yeah!” Eli says, grinning broadly. “They’ve already taken out the tube for my lung and I heal pretty fast! No ruptured lung is going to stop me!”

"Your optimism is admirable," she responds cordially before her phone starts ringing. "I'm sorry, I have to take this." 

She stands up and walks out of the curtained area, leaving both of them alone again. 

"How's it going, Silvana?" says Eli, grinning. 

She doesn't respond. 

"Still on the silent treatment?" 

Silence.

"You know, having a one-sided conversation is not as fun as talking to somebody else."

Nothing.

"Ugh, I miss my mom. I wish she didn't have to work so much, but hospital bills are expensive." 

...

"Where's your dad by the way? He was here this morning, right?"

This time Silvana points at the table, where a note is scribbled in big, looping handwriting. It says 'Work emergency. Had to go. Silvana was sleeping, didn't want to wake her -Franco.'

"You shouldn't be reading things!" Eli chastises, frowning at Silvana. "The doctor said to take it easy with eyestrain after the concussion." 

Silvana points with her chin towards the other side of the room. Eli's confused, glancing at the curtains before she gets it. "Oh! Your mom read it for you!"

She nods and resumes staring at the ceiling, her silence unbreaking.

"I didn't expect your mom to be that tall if I'm honest! She's almost my height and that's saying a lot! Is your dad smaller than her? Or did you like, get the Chocobreak out the gene piñata?"

Silvana turns to stare at her uncomprehending.

"'Cuz they're the shitty chocolates that are _always_ there without fail and nobody wants them?"

"How are you doing that?" asks Silvana. 

"Huh?" Eli is so surprised that Silvana talked that she completely blanks on what she said. 

"How... how are you so– so blasé about this entire thing?" Silvana says, painstakingly sitting up straighter, her fists tightening at her sides. "Jacobo and Parch– Pedro died. How? Do you not care at all?"

Eli gapes like a fish before she splutters and shakes her head wildly. "What?!? No! I care!" she answers, vomiting words because she doesn't know what else to do. "I'd just met them and then everything blew the fuck up and now I'm in a hospital! I don't know what the fuck is going on anymore but I can't do anything so I just– try not to think about it."

Silvana narrows her eyes in response and Eli leans back, her back brushing against the scratchy curtain. 

"So you choose to ignore what happened?!? To– to say nothing of who they were and what they did–?!?"

"I'm just as freaked out as you are but I don't know what to do and what to say about this? 'Yes, hi, my classmate went apeshit and somehow broke a metal pipe with his bare hands while he went all red-veined vampire'?!?"

Silvana suddenly goes still, her breath catching in her throat. "You saw that too?..." she whispers, her hands unfurling as her eyes go wide. "I'm not going crazy?"

"Sorry for that," says Tania as she ducks back into the curtains. "I just got a call from your father. He won't we able to arrive in time to see you out of the hospital or get your clothes from the house, so I'll have to go get them. But I have a meeting at two pm that I can't miss so I'll probably arrive at seven pm here."

"Wait, isn't it ten am?" Eli asks, tilting her head to the side. "Isn't there enough time to get there and be back sooner than that?” 

“It wouldn’t be very likely,” Tania says as she sends a message with her phone. “We live in Chía.” 

Eli winces. That makes much more sense. Chia is an hour and a half away from Bogotá on a  _ very _ good day and today is definitely not one of those, with it being Sunday and all. Only getting Silvana’s clothes would be a three-hour ride. No wonder Silvana had rented an apartment close to the campus! Wait–

“Your apartment!” Eli says. Both Silvana and her mother turn to stare at her. “Where are you going to stay now?”

“She’s going to stay in our home,” says Tania, tucking a strand of blond, wavy hair behind her ears. “She has at least a week more of rest. In the meantime, we’ll search for an apartment so she can continue her studies.”

“My house has extra room!” says Eli immediately, a grin blooming in her face. “It’s only a twenty-minute walk away from Uni, we would totally welcome Silvana there!” 

“That’s rather sudden. We wouldn’t want to impose–” 

“But searching for an apartment and handling the contracts and stuff would take more than a week. Plus, your daughter literally saved my life! Letting her stay at my house is the least I could do! And I promise staying in my house would be super cheap compared to actually renting an entire apartment–”

“I accept,” Silvana says, softly.

Her mother turns to look at her, her eyes wide and hopeful, reaching for her daughter with soft hands. “Silvie?” 

“I’m sorry for not talking, mom,” Silvana says, a tired smile on her face. “I won’t do it again.”

Tania envelops her in a hug and Silvana reaches for her mother, gripping her tightly, murmuring soft words into her ear. 

“Uuuh, I’ll go now, give you both some space,” Eli stutters awkwardly, pulling away before whirling around to snatch the pen from the bedside table and scribble her phone number in the same paper Eli’s father had written his note. “There! Text me once you can!”

With that, Eli whirls out of the curtains and pads over to her bed, settling in to wait for her mother to finally take her home. Hopefully, all the sawdust in her house would be gone by then.

* * *

Eli doesn't want to be here.

She thought she hated the hospital but now she desperately wishes to be back there. 

There's a throng of people in black around the mountain of flowers, the portraits of Jacobo and Pedro standing in the middle. 

She'd been in the hospital when the funerals for both of them happened, playing Candy Crush and ignoring all the “I’m sorry” messages she'd gotten. 

However, by the time the university-organized vigil was planned to happen she was already out of the hospital. She had no excuse not to go.

So she's now dressed in black, near the front of the crowd, both of the dead's families around her, crying. Silvana is a few ways over, looking like a ghost.

Eli doesn't belong here.

She barely knew them, she doesn't have the right to stand next to the people who had been closest to them. She doesn't have the right to cry, doesn't have the right to mourn because this is not a pain that belongs to her. 

So she spends most of the funeral trying to console as many people as she can, listening to crying people talk about memories and things both boys did. At some point, she hysterically giggles at the irony that she got to know them more after they died than when they were alive. 

She still cries like a baby once she's at home because she's awful at this and she feels awful for crying, she feels awful for having been there. 

She's awful in general but that's not news to her. 

* * *

"–mind you that I don't approve, of this... decision," says her mother from the front of the car, the frown on her face clearly visible from the rearview mirror. "I wish you would stay at our house for longer."

"I know, mom," Silvana answers, her shoulders sagging. She curls up tighter in the backseat. "I still want to start my classes again as soon as possible."

"It’s admirable that you put so much importance on your studies," says her father from the passenger seat, his black eyes have an edge of concern. "Please be careful."

"Yes, dad," says Silvana, absentmindedly putting her hand on the glass, watching the handprint she leaves behind on the foggy glass.

{They doubt you at every step. Shouldn’t they already trust you? Damn them.}

"We're here," Tania announces, parking in front of Eli's house with a little more force than necessary. 

"I'm sorry we couldn't come in with you," says her father, turning around to look at her. His black hair now has more white peppered in it. More wrinkles dot his sun-tanned face as he smiles apologetically. He reaches over to ruffle her hair and Silvana smiles in response. "Tell us how it went on Sunday, alright?" 

"Are you sure you don't want to stay with us?" her mother says, her worry finally evident in her voice. 

All Silvana sees are the empty hallways of her house, reminders of her parents everywhere, but them never being there. Living on her own was less lonely than living with her parents. 

{Scream that truth at them! Rage for their return! You deserve more than your parent’s absence!}

"I'm sure," she says, getting out of her seat to kiss her parent's cheeks goodbye. She opens the door, her splintered finger making a dull _tock_ against the handle until she steps out onto the street. 

The first thing she notices is that most of the sidewalk is worn and cracked, a few weeds poking out here and there. 

She grimaces as she opens the trunk, pain lancing up and down her body. While she'd been cleared to get out of the hospital, not all of her burns had been healed yet. Dragging her two suitcases and cat carrier behind her makes her wince. 

She walks up to Eli's house, double-checking the address, while she hears her parent's car drive away. Eli's house is white that had been worn down to grey through time, the walls bumpy. It is sandwiched between two other houses, the only differences between them being the colors of the metal gates at the front. 

The gate on Eli's house is black and after it lay a very small tiled patio filled with plants. The front door has intricate vines painted on the dark surface, curling up to reach the door handle. Now that she's looking at it, she can spot similar vines on the frame of the window beside the door. 

She shakes herself out of her reverie and searches for some kind of doorbell. She finds it, stuck on one of the metal gate bars and she presses it. Then sees the curtains of the window move, somebody peaking out from behind them, and then Eli swings open the door. 

Eli is wearing a pair of overalls over an oversized zebra shirt, her black hair in a very messy braid. For some reason, she's also barefoot.

"Shoulda warned ya! The doorbell doesn't work!" she says opening the door with an excited bounce in her step. "Welcome to my home!" 

"Thank you for welcoming me," Silvana answers, trying to drag her suitcases inside without wincing too much.

"Wait a sec– MOOOOOOM, SILVANA'S HERE! WE NEED HELP WITH HER SUITCASES!"

Silvana winces from the volume.

{That is enough! Silence her!}

"Leave the suitcases there, my mom will take care of them. Burns hurt like a bitch, right?" Eli says, gesturing to a patch of raised, red skin on her neck, standing out starkly over her mahogany-colored skin. "Come on! Come on in!"

Silvana blinks and opts to follow her inside. 

"First up! My house only has one corridor cuz it's pretty small. On the left is the living room!" 

The first thing that strikes Silvana is color. There's a couch completely enveloped in a knitted rainbow wool cover, facing a coffee table with what looks to be a child's rendition of a flower field painted on it. On the other side of the room, facing the window is a recliner chair that's painted like Van Gogh's starry night down to the detail, though it has a few patches where the paint is flaking off. Even the walls have been painted on, some parts of them looking old and unskilled, others new and breathtaking. 

There are knickknacks all over the place; a ceramic dog statuette peaking out from under the couch, a heart hanging from a lamp and glass beads hanging from the ceiling and countless other little artistic pieces littering every available surface.

"It's... quite unique," Silvana says, craning her head to look around more. 

"Thanks!" Eli smiles, wider than the sun. "My mom never believed in putting limits to art and that's basically what happened to the walls."

"You did all this?" asks Silvana, turning to look at Eli's beaming face.

"Not all of it, some of it is my mom's. She's an artist as a hobby! The rainbow couch cover is hers, the Starry Night recliner chair was my job." 

"And the coffee table?"

"That was a joint project. We draw one thing on it on our birthdays. We've done it since I was seven," she says, grabbing her braid and fidgeting with it, her long black hair flipping between her fingers. 

"C'mon, I'll show you the kitchen!" she says and grabs Silvana's hand. On the other side of the corridor is an awning and Silvana almost trips and falls because of a step she didn't see.

Teacup hisses inside of her carrier, her claws poking out from the mesh. 

"I'm sorry, my Lady," Silvana says, letting her hand rest on the mesh of the carrier, Teacup's little wet nose bumping against her fingers. "You do not deserve such appalling treatment." 

"Oh my gosh, your cat's in there?!?" Eli squeaks, bending down to be face to face to the carrier. "Hiiiiii, hi you pretty kitty! You're so cute!"

"Please don't get so close to her, she's not very trusting of strangers," Silvana says, angling the carrier away from her.

{If she so much as lays on finger on your precious cat, strangle her!}

"Aww, ok!" Eli says, straightening up and bouncing on the balls of her feet. "So here's the kitchen! Do you know how to cook?"

"I can handle myself," Silvana says, inspecting the shelves. 

"Cool! We usually plan a menu on Sunday and cook everything each morning. When do you usually get up?"

"Around eleven am."

"Eleven?!?" Eli says, her eyes open wide.

"Please don't tell me you're a morning person."

"I wake up at five am!"

"Every day?"

"Every single day!"

"Oh for the love of–" {Poison her!}

"What's going on there girls?" says an amused, gentle voice. Leaning on the doorway is a woman just as tall as Silvana, which means pretty short. She has Eli's brown skin and dark, straight hair, but has black eyes instead of Eli’s amber ones. She's dressed in a flowy, bright green dress, patterned with triangles on the bottom of it. She's... surprisingly young, for the mother of a university student.

"Hi, mom!" Eli says, opening her arms for a hug. 

"C'mon here, cuddlebug," she says, entering the kitchen and hugging Eli. "You must be Silvana! I'm Irunú, nice to meet you." 

"Hello, Mrs...," Silvana says, waiting for her last name.

Irunú laughs. "I'm no Mrs, Silvana! I don't have a husband, never have. It's always been me and my cuddlebug here." 

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't–"

"Don't worry about it!" Irunú says, waving a hand in the air, a smile on her face. "Now! Continue with the tour, girls! Tonight is special, dinner's on me!"

"Whoooooo!" cheers Eli, kissing her mother on the cheek. "C'mon Silvana! Let's gooooooooo!"

Eli runs out of the room and Silvana follows her at a more sedate pace. She finds Silvana practically bouncing in place at the end of the corridor.

"So! Here is my mom's room," she says pointing to the room at the end of the corridor, then she points to a door on the left. "And here's mine! And also yours."

Chaos is the first thing that pops up in Silvana's head once she's past the doorway. There are three easels set up in there in various stages of being transformed into paintings, but they for some reason are simultaneously used as hangers. All of the drawers in her closet are open and despite the fact that there are free clothing hangers, most of her clothes are in a pile at the bottom of the closet. There's a hammock hung near Eli's bed chock full of stuffed animals, at least half of them hand-sewn. And on the unmade bed, there is a mess of open notebooks and paper. 

"What is– are those miniature seahorses all over the floor?" 

"Yeah, I needed a crap-ton of those, like three bags, and one of the bags broke when I threw it in the room so now there are seahorses all over the place!" 

"When was this?"

"A week ago."

"Ah. I see," Silvana mutters. 

{What waste of a human being, isn’t she? But it would only take one murder threat to scare her into submission}

Silvana shakes her head and instead sets the carrier on the bed at the other side of the room which she supposes is going to be hers. She opens the carrier and Teacup carefully pads out, sniffing the bed. Silvana smiles, carefully petting her head. 

"Awww, cute kitty is back! What's her name? And what's her breed?" Eli asks, plopping herself down on the soon-to-be Silvana's bed and staring at her with those amber eyes.

"Her name's _Teacup_ and she's a Russian Blue," answers Silvana, scratching her cat behind the ears.

" _Teacup_? In English?" asks Eli, cocking her head to the side. "Why that?"

"I got _Teacup_ in England. It was the most English thing I could think of."

"Ooooh, so she's a _p_ _osh English Lady,_ " Eli says, the last words in English, trying and astronomically failing to imitate a British accent. 

Silvana snorts, immediately hiding her face in embarrassment. 

"You got a cute smile!" says Eli and Silvana's face turns even redder. Curse her pale skin. 

Maybe things will turn out alright in the end, Silvana thinks. 

Now if only she could stop hearing voices. 

{You were the one that agreed to the contract, Silvana. The only one to blame is yourself.}

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s my Discord server: https://discord.gg/P5TRZxn  
> And my Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/crystalquillcreates


	3. Chapter 3

Eli sometimes surprises herself by being bored. 

She almost died. She'd thought she would have a new appreciation of life and the fleeting moments it offers or something like that, but labor law class is still as boring as ever. It's... a relief if she's honest with herself. 

Silvana's beside her and she's not looking relieved at all. It looks as if she's trying to stab the table with her pen as she writes her notes. (Note to self: ask her for tutoring help once at home. She understands jack shit of what the teacher's saying.)

While she hears the teacher drone on and on she winces when Silvana’s nails scrape against the desk, and she turns towards her, a confused expression on her face.

Silvana's frown deepens and deepens, her face twisting as if she's in pain. 

"Sil– uh, Silvana? Are you okay?" Eli asks, watching as Silvana's shoulders begin to shake. 

She doesn't answer, instead shaking her head and gritting her teeth. Eli swears she hears Silvana's pen creak in her grasp.

"Silvana?"

"SHUT UP! JUST SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE!"

Eli jumps backward, almost falling off her seat. 

Silvana's standing, breathing hard, tearing the air apart with only her glare. Then she starts, blinks and realizes everybody's staring at her. She opens her mouth as if to say something, but then she bolts, running to the door of the classroom. 

Eli sits stunned in her seat for a heartbeat. Then she springs up and yells "I'll go after her!" in the teacher's general direction before vaulting over the table, almost face-planting at the action, but manages to right herself and say "I'm okay!" before running out the door.

It's in that moment that Eli realizes she has no fucking idea where Silvana could've gone to. The uni campus is spread out, with plenty of odd little caves somebody could hide in. Not to mention it's an open campus: she could be just as easily in any of the nearby buildings. 

She tries calling Silvana's phone, only for some classmate of hers to answer. Turns out Silvana left her phone in the classroom because of course she did. 

"Fucking hell. Think Eli, think! Where could she have gone?" 

That's when she notices the splotches of ink on the floor. Silvana probably broke her pen and it’s leaking everywhere, Eli realizes.

Eli tears off in that direction, trying to spot even the tiniest glop of ink even as they stop being so frequent and taper off. At least Eli knows which door Silvana used to get out of the building because of the inky handprint on it.

Once outside she finds another inky handprint on nearby stair rails and shoots off in that direction, unintentionally scaring random people walking in the corridors with her wild run.

She's at the edge of the uni campus, so she stumbles to a stop and asks the guard at the gates: "Did you see somebody come through here? Like, ye high, Asian, black hair, dressed like she should be on her way to a very important business meeting and not a random class–" 

"You're her friend?" the guard asks, looking at her like she's the nth annoyance she's had to face.

"Yup!" Eli cheerfully replies, trying to look as friendly as possible despite heaving breath like she's got a frog stuck down her throat. 

"She went that way," the guard says, pointing at the little garden strip between the uni buildings and the fence that separates the campus from the streets. 

"Thank you guard lady!" Eli shouts, before barreling down to the grass. 

There's barely anybody on it since it's already starting to get dark, freezing gusts of wind tearing through the sky without warning. 

There's only a professor having a smoke on a bench that Eli runs by before she rounds a corner. After this, the garden strip becomes wider but ends with a fence maybe ten meters further. There's a lone tree growing smack-dab in the middle of the half-hidden garden, and Eli finally spots Silvana's figure, huddled behind it. 

"Silvana!" Eli shouts, running towards her. 

Silvana raises her head, startled, drawing herself into a tighter ball on instinct. 

Eli reconsiders and instead of tackle-hugging her, she decides to drop to her knees near her. "Are you okay?!?"

"I'm fine," Silvana says tiredly, trying to dry tears from her face, but since her hand is still covered in ink she only manages to make herself look as if she'd tried to put war paint on herself, made a mistake, tried to wipe it off and then realized she couldn't. 

"You scared me! Well, I think you scared the whole class, but that's beside the point. What the hell happened?"

"I– I don't know," she answers, looking back at the brick building. 

"Uh–uh, you don't get to lie to me. Something happened and you're going to tell me why because as your friend I need to know!"

"You're my friend?" Silvana asks in a genuinely doubtful tone, raising an eyebrow.

That... hurts more than Eli cares to admit.

"Of course we're friends, we fought that maniac together! Well, at least you fought, I just called the police– Nevermind! The point is! We fought together and because of that, we're friends! Anime says so!"

Silvana blinks and snorts, and then looks surprised at herself for doing so.

Eli is internally celebrating her victory at getting Silvana to stop crying, when Silvana sighs and sets her head on her knees.

"I..." Silvana hesitates, before whirling around and clamping on Eli's forearm so hard she yelps. "Swear to me you aren't going to tell this to  _ anybody _ ."

"Uuuh, ok?" Eli says and then mimes closing her mouth with a lock and throwing away the key. 

"I'm hearing voices," says Silvana, curling herself even tighter. "Well... just one voice that won't  _ shut up! _ "

"So that's who you were shouting at! Phew, I thought you were shouting at me," Eli says with a smile.

Silvana stares at her. "That's it? No concern? No nothing?"

"Should I be showing it? I thought you just wanted to vent for a while?" Eli asks before her eyes widen. "You're serious. You’re actually serious." 

"Did you think I wasn't being serious?" asks Silvana with a dangerous undertone.

"Uh, duh!" answers Eli, and by the way Silvana's eyes narrow she guesses that wasn't the correct answer. Why is she so shit at talking to people!?! "But now I believe you! You made it plenty clear you're being serious!"

Silvana only sighs and squishes her cheek on one of her knees. 

"What does the voice tell you though?" asks Eli, crawling so she's sitting cross-legged in front of Silvana. 

"...Mostly insults. At myself, other people, objects, the situation... and if I try to argue back it only gets worse," Silvana says, pensive. "It's annoying. One moment it insults me for being lazy. And the next it insults me for being a boring workaholic!"

"Oh! So it's as if your life is a video and you only get comments from the world's most persistent hater!"

"I'll never understand your metaphors," declares Silvana, leaning her head back against the tree trunk, crossing her hands over her chest. 

"Wait– fuck! It's so obvious now!" Eli says, standing up and waving her arms around trying to imitate the victory dance her mind is doing. "You're being possessed by Parches!"

" _ What. _ " 

"Think about it! It started once he died and it was suuuuuuper clear he liked making you mad! It makes total sense!" 

"No! It doesn't! Ghosts don't exist!" 

"Yes, they do! How else do you explain the voice?!?"

"Stress and grief and– and unresolved anger issues!"

"Nonbeliever! Shun the nonbeliever! Shuuuuuuuun!"

"This conversation is going nowhere!"

"That's right! We're going nowhere so we should go somewhere!"

"What?"

Eli laughs and tugs Silvana hard enough to make her stand up. "I have an idea! Let's use a Ouija board in my house to see what Parches' ghost wants!"

Eli ignores Silvana's protests and drags her aaaaaaalll the way back to the classroom and snatches their belongings. Class is thankfully already over.

She's already half-way to the parking lot, about to start the trek through a shortcut out of campus to get there faster when Silvana stops dead in her tracks.

"Let me go!" Silvana says, wrenching her arm from Eli's grip hard enough to hurt. "You can't just grab me and ignore me while tugging me around like some kind of dog on a leash! Who do you think you are?!?" 

Silvana is outright trembling with rage, her teeth bared and her eyes open so wide it's unnatural.

Eli startles and takes a couple of steps back, putting her hands in the air as if she was dealing with a rabid dog. 

"You just pulled me around in front of the entire class! Everybody was looking–"

"I swear to God I didn't–

"I care less about your reasons than I would about a rotting pig! You have no right to embarrass me in any way!" Silvana snarls and surges forward. 

Eli shrieks and flinches, bringing up her hands to protect her face. Dust and pebbles explode beside her face. She's frozen for a second waiting for  _ something _ ,  _ anything _ , but then she opens her eyes, not really noticing she'd closed them before.

Silvana's fist is buried wrist-deep in the concrete wall behind her, centimeters from Eli's face. She's breathing heavily, still snarling, but her teeth are now stained a bright red, too vibrant to be blood. A drop of red liquid gathers on Silvana's canine and drips on the floor and Eli almost jumps out of her skin once she hears the little red drop  _ sizzle _ once it hits the floor, an acidic, warm stench wafting up around them. 

Silvana lurches, almost as if she was a puppet that just got their strings cut, but she catches herself at the last second, breathing in a shuddering gasp. Then she straightens, her eyes looking straight into Eli's own, before she yanks her hand out of the wall, taking a few horrified steps backward until she hits the other wall of the corridor, sliding down until she's slumped on the floor. 

Eli also slumps until she hits the ground, trying to breathe out the adrenaline. 

"What is wrong with me?" Silvana whispers in the silence of the corridor.

A cold gust surprises them both, drawing shivers from both of them. Silvana crosses her arms in a sort of self-hug, hunching in upon herself. 

Eli breathes. In and out. 

"I don't know," answers Eli honestly. "But I don't think we should ask the guards about that."

Silvana looks up, confused, before Eli points to the hole in the wall.

"Let's go," she says, picking herself up and her discarded backpack before stumbling. 

Eli reacts and steadies her, helping her walk. They both start on the trek back home through the winding streets outside of their university.

"Uh, I think we should discard the Oujia board and consider an exorcism," says Eli, hoping to fill the silence with something. "Cuz', uh, that whole thing looked pretty fucking demonic to me."

"Don't remind me," mumbles Silvana, her voice barely audible.

"C'mon, let's go home and ask the all-knowing, all-seeing Google for some quick and easy fixes for demonic possession. After snacks of course!" says Eli, smiling in an attempt to cheer her up.

Silvana doesn't even seem to notice, her eyes blank and listless, just like they were at the hospital. Eli gets worried that Silvana's going to stop talking again. 

"So! Uuuuh, what's your favorite food?" asks Eli. 

Silvana just turns to look at her, confusion evident on her face. 

"Tell me? Pleaaaaaase?" 

"... Hamburger."

"Really? I'd pegged you as one of those super-healthy eaters."

"I am," she says tiredly. "I avoid eating junk food as much as I can, but I still can't change the fact that I love hamburgers or sweets."

"I don't like sweet things at all. I don't know why but I get tired of sweetness really fast. The first time I tried Nutella I spit it out because it was too much at once."

"Huh. I'd pegged you as the kind of person who has a sweet tooth."

"I don't blame you! A lot of people tell me I act as if I was on a sugar rush 24/7." 

"You do," Silvana says, a small smile appearing on her face. 

"You should see me when hyperfocusing, tough. Mom tells me I look like a mummy since I forget to sleep and then I have zero energy but I still keep working on automatic."

"Huh. That would be nice," Silvana says distractedly.

"It isn't. At all, believe me. It's like, I can't go to the bathroom or eat or do literally anything else until I finish what I'm doing and then I feel like shit when I actually finish so–"

"No– Well, I mean yes, that sounds horrible, but do you see that?" Silvana asks, pointing at the other side of the street.

"See what?" Eli asks, turning to look. 

At the other side of the road is the Bogotá River, but everybody in the city knows it as El Caño because it's basically a glorified open-air sewage pipe but made of gray, graffitied concrete instead of metal. 

"On the tree, there's... I don't know how to describe it. It's like a dream-catcher, but made only of white thread, even the wooden circle it’s supposed to be woven in."

"I don't see anything," Eli answers, squinting at the darkness to try and see what Silvana's talking about. 

"Just– follow me," Silvana says, quickly crossing the street. 

Eli follows her, looking to see what she's talking about. 

"Silvana, there's nothing there."

"But, it's right in front of you," she insists, a tiny, worried sliver of doubt slipping into her voice. She slowly reaches out towards the tree. "It's right here–"

Silvana disappears.

Eli's heart stops in her chest, her breath turning to ice. "Silvana?!?"

She looks around and she finds nothing, just a lone street lamp shining at the end of the street. 

"Silvana, where are–" Eli walks up towards the tree, trying to see if Silvana's hiding behind it or something when she suddenly sees the dream-catcher Silvana was talking about. 

It's made of a thousand tiny, silvery threads woven into the air, a circle suspended as if by magic, a single gem-like thing floating in the middle. And the gem is getting bigger, the smooth white surface 

letting blacks and dark greens through, details breaking the surface like sharks from the sea, until the gem is big enough to swallow her. 

Eli screams, trying to leap backwards, but she trips on something and crashes to the ground.

When she opens her eyes, she gasps. 

She's in the middle of a dark forest, the trees impossibly made out of smooth black stone, the leaves turning out to be thousands upon millions of green spiders swaying together, giving the illusion of gusts of wind even though there are none. The ground is made of that same black stone, cold and solid. But what  _ really _ freaks Eli out is when she looks at the sky, all she finds is green; an unbroken carpet of the same trees around her hanging high above.

"Greetings."

Eli shrieks, clumsily standing up and turning around to find a woman dressed in an old, Conquistador-era dress, looking like a proper lady straight out of a three-hundred year old painting.

"I've been waiting for you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s my Discord server: https://discord.gg/P5TRZxn
> 
> And my Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/crystalquillcreates
> 
> Chapter's a little bit early since I won't be able to publish it on the 25th but hey! Early chapter!


	4. Chapter 4

From where she hides, Silvana sees Eli talking animatedly with the woman, apparently complimenting her dress, while the woman nods with a placid smile on her face. She doesn't trust that smile one bit.

Silvana walks over and sets herself defiantly before Eli, facing the woman and says "Who are you and what do you want?" 

"Oh! There is another one!" the woman says, her smile widening. "You both may call me Wick, and this is my realm."

"Your what?" asks Eli, putting her hand on Silvana's shoulder and standing on her right side. 

"My realm," the woman says, absently gesturing with smooth movements towards the black forest. "This is where I reside. It is quite beautiful, isn't it?"

"Yeah! In a trippy way, but still really pretty," answers Eli.

Silvana shoots her a look of reproach, but Eli shrugs in response. Silvana wants to scold at her, but for some reason, she can't muster up the will to be angry. 

{ _Are you still ignorant of the terms of our deal? And you like to think of yourself as smart.}_

A tired sigh is all Silvana seems to be capable of. 

"Can you tell us how to get out of here?" Silvana asks, looking at the trees than hang from upside-down earth 

"That’s all? And here I thought you'd be asking more questions," the woman softly laughs, but she begins walking. "Follow me and I'll show you the way out."

"Wait," says Silvana, narrowing her eyes. "You would be willing to tell us what is going on?"

"I would," the woman answers, turning her head to look at them. "If you agree to it, that is."

Silvana glances at Eli, who is looking thrilled. 

"Then yes."

The woman softly smiles and crumples to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.

"Lady! Lady, are you okay?!?" Eli says, lunging to the woman's side. 

Silvana grabs Eli's arm and tugs her behind. "Be careful! We don't know what–"

Something slams into the ground behind them, the sound of cracked earth reverberating at their backs. Both of them freeze, then whirl around to find–

A black orb floating in midair, eight, chipped black crystals twitch around it before bending into something like spindly legs, coming to resemble a cracked glass spider. A diamond-like shape comes to life inside the sphere, mimicking a floating eye.

"WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!?" shrieks Eli, diving behind Silvana. 

"Wonderful!" the thing warbles, a screech of stone against stone. "Then let us start this challenge! Reach the center of my web and I'll answer your questions."

"What the– Who said anything about a challenge?!?" asks Eli.

"You both accepted!" the spider-like thing giggles, it's arachnid legs tip-tapping on the earth.

"And if we don't play?" asks Silvana, her hands shaking beside her, rage slowly bubbling up her throat. 

"Then I'll hunt you until you do! I'll throw challenge after challenge after challenge until you die or win!" the spider laughs, before the white crystal inside it starts spinning, softly shining.

The green leaves on the trees start swaying as if an invisible breeze was running through them. Then all at once the spiders pretending to be leaves turn white and take flight, leaving thin strands of silky webbing in their wake. 

Then some of the bare tree trunks shudder and unearth themselves. They are nothing but a mass of spindly, black appendages, rising from the ground like zombies. They have no face, not even a facsimile of a body, and yet Silvana _knows_ their attention is pointed directly at the two of them. 

"And begin!"

One of the hundreds of balls of legs crawls towards them and Silvana throws her backpack at it. It plonks pathetically to the ground. 

"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING, RUN!" screams Eli, grabbing Silvana's arms and yanking furiously to move her. 

{REFUSE! THIS FAE HAS DARED TO THREATEN YOU. KILL IT!}

"I don't want to play by this– this liar's rules! I REFUSE TO BACK DOWN!" Silvana yells back, ripping her arm out of Eli's grasp. 

Eli tumbles forward right into one of the newly-formed webs and ends up sticking to it, trying frantically to free herself from it. 

Silvana takes off one of her shoes and chucks it at one of the leg-balls and it strikes true, by getting skewered on the black appendages. 

"SHIT, SHIT, SHIT, SHIT ON THE SHIT AND BURN THAT FUCK THE DAMN UP–" Eli tugs one final time and gets bursts from the webs and runs as far from the sentient leg-ball as she can, darting deeper into the forest. 

With shaking hands and one thought on her mind, Silvana throws herself at the nearest leg-ball and punches it. The black stone cracks like glass, one of the legs falling broken to the floor, but the other ones crawl on towards her, until she finds herself trapped below the leg-ball, the spindly appendages serving as the bars of a cage.

She doesn't stop punching, each strike cracking the black stone further, and her fists ache and bruise and she keeps punching. She won't surrender! She won't stop! This thing pisses her off and she–

She screams her rage for all to hear.

* * *

Eli shudders as Silvana's scream of rage tears through her, but she keeps running. As she goes by, more and more black-stoned trees unearth themselves and reveal they're actually leg-balls, and the sky keeps becoming whiter and whiter, chock-full of the little spiders knitting like there's no tomorrow. 

Panic rises in her chest. The more she runs, the more she can see the leg-balls crawling towards her, heavy steps leaving gouges on the soft earth. With how many trees there were, soon she will have nowhere to go. And then she stumbles into a web. 

“GET IT OFF GET IT OFF–” Eli shrieks and flops around, trying to shake the web off. Then she stops, realizing it fell off easier than it should have. She then touches a strand lightly and she finds it doesn’t stick at all. 

Eli’s eyes widen, and she looks up at the sky, white with silk strands and small spiders, and a wild idea pops into her head. 

The ground shudders under her feet and behind her one of the leg-balls rises from the ground. Its legs screech against each other, creating a sound that’s the mix of the chime of a wine-glass and nails against a chalkboard.

Her legs are in motion before Eli’s mind catches up, and she lunges towards one of the still-buried leg-balls and climbs it like the tree it pretends it is. It’s _fucking difficult_. The thing is as smooth as glass, and slipping ends up revealing that the edges of those fuckers are sharp. Trying to go from the lowest branch to the next earns her a cut on her shin. Eli breathes through the pain with the practice of a clumsy childhood spent falling off things she was not supposed to climb. 

When she reaches the tallest branch, she lunges for the white strands and her hands close around them, leaving her dangling over the ground. 

With all the grace of an eight year-old swinging on monkey bars, Eli grabs another clump of strands and hangs on, flinging her leg around to try and step on a tightly-woven part of the web and use it to climb higher. 

The tree she was just standing on shudders to life. 

“FUCK!” Eli shouts, jumping for the web-ledge she’d found, one of the leg-ball’s pointy appendages shredding the strands where she had just been. 

With shaking hands, Eli starts the climb upwards towards the center of the web. The white little spiders scuttle all along the strands, climbing over her, tangling on her hair, pinching her and Eli shudders, but she can’t shake them off or she’ll let go. She’s already tired, frantically chanting “don’t look down, don’t look down–” her teeth grit so hard she hears them creak. 

She reaches a knot of the web, barely big enough to support her whole weight, and she collapses on it breathing hard. Her shirt, a neon blue piece she stitched star-shaped buttons to, clings to her body with sweat. 

It’s eerily peaceful. It’s deadly silent. Eli hates it. 

“SILVANA!” Eli shouts, immediately devolving into a coughing fit, her throat raw as if she had gargled glass dust. She tries to breath in, smooth out her breathing. “SILVANA! WHERE ARE YOU?!?” 

No one answers her. 

Her heart sinks in her chest. 

Then her perch shudders and collapses, and she’s flung down. She lands into a mess of web, the strands tangling around her arm and wrenching it. Eli screams in pain, swinging her legs wildy until she latches on to another ledge. It leaves her in an uncomfortable contortion, struggling to keep herself stepping on a ledge too far away from her caught arm, feeling as if she’s being torn in two.

With tears in her eyes, Eli reaches out to a handhold and uses it to step onto another, closer one. The pressure on her arm immediately lessens, and a strangled whine leaves her throat.

Through her fear, she uses her other hand to yank the strands away from her trapped arm. She cradles it, burning pain radiating from her shoulder. 

A cluster of webs nearby suddenly untangles and Eli looks down. 

Vertigo immediately assaults her, but she shakes her head, opening her eyes just a crack to see those leg-balls on the ground snipping away at the base of the strands, wrenching away all of the support points of the web.

Eli inhales a sharp breath, struggling to her feet. She grabs the next cluster of webs, thankful that her hurt arm is her left, and heaves herself up. She needs to reach the center before the leg-balls finally snap the threads she is climbing. 

"You are very resilient," a voice says to her right, and Eli turns her head to see the same, horrifying spider-creature from before. "I hadn't expected that." 

Eli sobs, too short of breath to answer, and instead tries to climb faster, further away from the thing crawling up alongside her. 

"Though your physical state is quite abysmal to what I was expecting. You are wearing pants as a woman. Does that not mark you as a warrior?"

The baffling question rings in Eli's head and dissipates in the whirlwind of fear. She lunges upwards desperately, using her injured arm through the blinding pain. 

"Hmm, it seems times have changed," the black spider monster says. "But your spirit to overcome this challenge is exemplary." 

Eli screams and keeps climbing, shaking her head to throw off one of the white spiders clinging to her ear. 

'Please, please, please I don't want to die! I don't want to leave my mom alone, please she has lost enough, I don't want to be the reason she–'

"Congratulations! You reached the center," the spider-thing says and Eli freezes. 

She looks at the thing, where it radiates a cheerful aura. 

Eli's hands shake. 

Then, as one, all of the threads snap. 

Eli screams as air whistles past her ears, the points of the black leg-balls growing closer and closer. And then she stops, caught by a net that she sticks to, bouncing up and down and up and down until it stops, her breath coming in short puffs of air. 

All around her the strands float to land on her, and she sees as in the sky, the sides, everywhere, the webs fall on the trees. For a single, bizarre moment, she thinks she's inside a snowglobe.

The black spider crashes to the ground nearby, leaving deep gouges in the earth. 

"DON'T KILL ME!" Eli shouts, struggling against the stickiness of the web, but all she manages is to make her shoulder hurt even worse. 

The spider slowly scuttles towards her. "Why would I do that?" It says, and then cleanly cuts the web away, freeing Eli. "Now, it is my turn to uphold my side of the bargain. Care for some tea?"

* * *

Silvana stares sightlessly at the black, twitching legs of the creature holding her captive. 

Holes and cracks litter the moving bars of her prison, but only emptiness is what she feels at the sight. Her knuckles are bloody, pulsing with pain. She breathes. It's the only thing she can do. 

"Silvana!" 

She doesn't answer. The voice sounds too far away, too dreamy. She wants to sleep. 

"Silvana! Oh my god are you okay?!?" 

The legs of her prison move, but Silvana doesn't. Eli's face surfaces in her field of vision, but Silvana doesn't have the energy to acknowledge her. 

"She is alright, a little hurt maybe, but mostly it's magical overexertion combined with giving up far too much in exchange." 

“... You have to tell me what the hell that means.”

"Over tea of course!" the creature says, scurrying ahead of both of them. 

"Wait! I'm too tired to carry her!" Eli says. "You do it!"

"Is that what you want in exchange?" the spider says, turning around with excitement. 

"NO! FUCK NO!"

"Alright then!" the spider says, going over to Silvana and gingerly wrapping thin strands of webbing around her, lifting her off the ground in a woven hammock. 

Silvana stares at the white crystal inside the creature, being lightly rocked under its legs.

She's man-handled into sitting on a chair made of rocks, covered in soft moss, in front of a table made of piled rocks. 

There's already a full tea set complete with a steaming teapot, made of... is that webbing? How?

Silvana doesn't have the energy to question it, instead letting herself fall limp on the chair. 

"Here!" says the bizarre spider, moving threads to set a cup in front of both of them. "Drink up! I'm sorry I don't have any food to serve both of you. It takes much more magic to keep food from spoiling than long-lasting tea tablets."

"It's fine!" assures Eli, taking a sip from her tea, smiling at the taste. 

Silvana does nothing. 

"So! Uhm... where the hell do I start with this," Eli mumbles into her cup. She starts fidgeting with one of the ends of her hair, pulling it repeatedly. "Uuuuh, what's up with the whole 'magical exhaustion' thing?"

"Oh? You don't know? I didn't think you would be so uninformed. Magical exhaustion is when somebody uses far too much magic–"

"No! I mean why does she have magic? Is the punching thing magic? ‘Cuz Silvana is freaked the _fu_ _ck_ out about that."

The creature suddenly goes silent and still. “... Do you not know magic?”

“I mean, I know _of_ magic?” Eli answers, swirling her tea in her cup. “All my life it was this… thing that could or couldn’t exist. I wished it did, but I kinda lost hope as the years went on. And then _this_ happened and it confirmed!” She then glances back at Silvana’s tired form and winces. “Even if it was confirmed in a _majorly_ sucky way.”

Silvana wants to slap the teacup out of her hands, but she doesn’t.

“How– how much time has passed?” The creature scurries from the other side of the table to stand before Eli. “Would you tell me what year it is?”

A strike of fear so powerful it breaks through the haze of meaninglessness makes Silvana lurch forward landing on the table so hard it makes the things on it rattle. “Don’t answer her! Please don’t answer her! It will start another game if you do, I can’t– I can’t.” And as suddenly as it came, the fear leaves Silvana and she remains limply sprawled on the table.

“What the fuck,” Eli mutters and Silvana can feel her eyes on her, can imagine her expression of disbelief.

“I am certainly confused too, since this game would be of your choosing,” the spider muses, it’s legs click-clacking. “Well then. I offer in exchange to ‘heal’ your friend partly of her condition.”

"No other catch?" Eli asks and after the creature waves one of its legs in a negative. "Then I think I'll trust ya!"

"Alright," the spider says, crawling towards Silvana. It lays two of its legs on the sides of Silvana's face and gently lifts her head up.

Unease crawls up Silvana's back as she faces the creature. A voice in her screams that this shouldn't exist, that she's going insane, but she can't bring herself to close her eyes in defiance as the gem starts spinning inside the creature, softly glowing white. 

Then a current of energy flows through her, making her gasp. She fists her hands at her sides as frustration slams into her, the same breed of frustration that comes when she gets stuck on a specific song while practicing the violin, or when one math problem continually slips her understanding. She _hates_ reminders of her own weakness.

"That should do," the creature informs, letting Silvana's head go, scuttling back to its place on the table. 

Silvana blinks, shaking her head and then looking at her hands as if she hadn't seen them before. The tiredness that had been sunk in her bones after her wild punching hasn't disappeared, but somehow she can move again. Something about it leaves a bitter aftertaste in her mouth, but she can't put her finger on why. 

"Are you better now?" asks Eli, smiling at her.

"Yes, I am," Silvana says, folding her hands in front of her. 

"The date's 2014, by the way!" Eli cheerfully says at the creature. 

"Oh, dear. Time's passed much more than I thought," the spider says, but her tone sounds more thoughtful than surprised or dismayed, which instantly puts Silvana on edge.

"Nevermind about the date," Silvana cuts in, narrowing her eyes at the spider. "What is wrong with me?"

"I... assume you're talking about the fae that is possessing you," the spider says.

"Hold on, what?!?" Eli says, "Okay, I'm gonna need you to back up and explain because what the hell?"

"... how do I begin?" the creature says. It stays still for one second and then a thread sprouts from it and four of its legs separate from the creature, lightly levitating to hold it. 

"Magic permeates everything and everyone. There is no place in the universe devoid of it," it explains, its four legs weaving the single thread into a tridimensional representation of the planet earth.

"Us fae are beings made entirely of magic and we are capable of shaping it into whatever we see fit. Humans, on the other hand, have no magic of their own. However they are capable of something we fae are not: they can absorb the ambient magic and store it."

The spider then undoes its own impossible creation and instead forms a tridimensional figure of a human and an indistinct ball. 

"Us fae _want_ that magic from humans, as it is our source of power. It's what sustains us. Humans on the other hand have always sought the magical feats fae can perform. As such–" the spider weaves a circle connecting both figures. "–this created a mutually beneficial relationship that continued for centuries." 

"Until?" Eli asks, her eyes wide.

"Until a few hundred years ago. 600 years, give or take," the spider says tersely. "I know not what happened, but suddenly I was unable to leave my realm. And from what Boile has been able to tell me, so did it– He? She? Sorry, speaking the human tongue is confusing when it comes to the matter of gender... well, Boile told me he'd rather be called a he."

"Yes, but _how_ do I get rid of it– he– Boile, whatever," asks Silvana. 

"... There was once a group of humans who knew of a way to end a possession without the fae and human reaching an agreement.” The thread the spider created is suddenly reabsorbed by it. "In that matter, I have no further information for either of you."


	5. Chapter 5

Silvana walks with her gaze stuck firmly at the ground, her resting bitch-face making it look as if she's glaring at it. 

They don't talk, their steps loud in the silence of the empty, dark street, only the rumble of cars breaking the stillness.

It comes as a surprise when both of them finally arrive at Eli’s front door. 

With an unspoken agreement, both of them stealthily open the black gate, wincing at the loud shriek it lets out regardless. Eli opens the front door, peering into the empty main corridor, before gesturing for Silvana to come in. Both of them tiptoe, trying to hear if Eli's mother is in there. 

"HNNGGGGGGG"

They jump, their hearts leaping to their throats until they find Eli's mother, fast asleep on the couch. Irunu’s mouth is wide open, buzzsaw snores coming out of it, as she lays on the Starry Night couch still in day clothes. 

"Jesus fuck," Eli mutters, a few nervous giggles slipping out her mouth. "Come on. Mom's not going to wake up for a while. We just gotta go all nurses on each other, take a make-up brush to our faces, and voilá! Problem solved!"

Silvana nods, but her eyes don't leave Irunú's sleeping form.

They both enter their room, Eli immediately face-planting on her bed, letting out an undignified groan.

Silvana makes a beeline for her sleeping cat, lightly waking her. Teacup lets out a bleary mrrrrmp? before Silvana gently picks her up and goes to her bed, curling up with her cat.

"I don't wanna get uuuuuup," Eli says, burrowing deeper into the comforter. 

Silvana doesn't respond, too busy making her cat purr. 

"Whyyyyyyy," she says, dramatically slipping off her bed and onto the floor, huffing once before walking to their shared bathroom. She comes back with a first-aid kit she probably dug out from her very messy side of the cabinet.

She tosses it on the bed, opening it. 

Both of them take a cotton ball and pour a little disinfectant on it, dabbing it on their many, many bruises and cuts. 

Silvana finds that she doesn’t remember exactly how she got most of them. She remembers the burst of frenzied rage and the first few punches, but she has bruises all over her knees and shins when she doesn’t remember kicking at all. 

“–vana? Earth to Silvana!”

“I’m sorry, were you saying something?” Silvana responds, raising her gaze from a bruise on the side of her thigh.

“Do you know how to use make-up to hide bruises?” Eli responds, staring at Silvana, her graceful fingers gently tugging on a strand of hair.

“Not really?” she answers, before throwing her rust-colored cotton ball at the trash can in the corner of the room. It misses. 

“I gotta teach you how to do that!” Eli says, smiling brightly and bouncing in place. 

Silvana has no idea how she has energy after all  _ that _ . But then Eli deflates.

“I don’t wanna get up agaaaain,” Eli whines, curling up in her bed. “Can’t you go get the make-up things? I got the first-aid stuff.”

"Fine," Silvana answers, sighing. She incorporates, sitting cross-legged in her bed, running a hand through her straight black hair. 

She walks over to the bathroom, picking up Eli’s massive make-up kit, consisting of two cardboard boxes painted in all colors, and gingerly placing her own black make-up case on top.

Silvana navigates the cluttered room, dodging clothes and fake gemstones before she passes the invisible line dividing Eli's half of the room to her half, where everything is exactly in the place it should be. 

She strides to her bed and drops the boxes, where Eli opens one of them and takes a mirror out of it.

"You know, hiding bruises is kind of easy compared to hiding my arm or your knuckles," Eli says, taking a makeup brush to one side of her knee, making a bruise there go from an angry purple to something that would possibly happen to somebody clumsy. Silvana tries her best to imitate her. "What are we gonna do about that?"

"...My knuckles would be hidden with gloves," answers Silvana, trying to cover up a bruise on her face. "But your arm requires an excuse. The best lies come from truth; say you were climbing the tree to try and find something I'd spotted and slipped."

"Ugh, fine. I hate lying to my mom, you know!" Eli says, while she– applies red eyeshadow?

"Aren't you supposed to disguise your wounds?" asks, Silvana, pausing to look at Eli.

Eli stops what she's doing and facepalms. "Sorry! I got distracted," she says, looking sheepish before going back to work. "Is that all the make-up you have? Or did most of it get destroyed in the fire?"

The bluntness of the question surprises Silvana, and she pauses. "Yes and no," she says, going back to her task. "It was destroyed in the fire, but all I use for make-up is in here. I... don't like make-up."

"I really like it!" Eli says. "It's just like painting but with your body! Well, I guess that tattoos are the same thing but you can't experiment so much with those. You fuck one up, it's there foreeeeever. I think I still have my tattoo gun somewhere though."

"I am not going to ask."

"Please ask! I have sooooo many stories about it. Did you know I have a tattoo on my ankle? I did it myself and it's a very shitty churro that kind of ended looking like a sausage so I fixed it to look like a dachshund." 

"I don't understand you at all," Silvana admits, closing her hand mirror with a snap. "You seem like a sociable person, but from what I gathered, you don't have any friends. You are, dare I say, an artistic genius, and yet I can't seem to grasp any meaning inside your art pieces aside from simple creation. No feeling, no message, no nothing. You are... peculiar."

"It's not the first time somebody points out I'm weird," Eli says, her smile growing a little strained before she puts her mirror back into the box. "So! What are we going to do?"

"About what?" Silvana asks, one of her eyebrows rising primly.

"About the whole fae thing!" Eli says, getting up from the bed. "The spider said it couldn't help us anymore, but that means that there are other fae that could! We just gotta find 'em!"

"You can't be serious," says Silvana, her voice horrified. "We almost died back there! That leg-ball-thing could have crushed me by slamming down, you could have fallen, or lost your arm or–or– You can't expect me to believe you're willing to waltz into another of those creature's realms!"

"Why wouldn't I? You're like, possessed aren't you?" Eli asks.

Silvana flinches, but she straightens up.

"I may be possessed, but I am stronger than this spirit. I know what it wants now: my anger, I will simply not give it anymore," states Silvana, sternly looking at Eli, imitating her mother's 'if you disagree with me I will be _very_ disappointed' look.

"Are you serious?" Eli says, drawing back with disbelief. "I've known you for like a month and let me tell ya, you're like 80% anger."

"Do you really think that throwing our lives on the line carelessly is nothing else than an idiotic plan?!?" Silvana stands up from the bed, facing Eli straight-on. "I will not go anywhere near those creatures again!"

"So you'll keep going to class like nothing's wrong?" Eli asks, her tone sharpening with irritation. "Your emotional range is that of a bull dipped in red paint! You'll kill somebody at this rate!"

"I won't!" Silvana rebukes, her fist tightening until her knuckles are white, nails digging into her palm. "I– I am better than that! It is my responsibility to control myself. I can do this."

"No you can't, I'm telling you!" Eli raises her voice. "We _n_ _eed_ help from the fae, it's the only way!"

"It's not," says Silvana, coldly. Her glare sharpens, her grey eyes glinting like the edge of a blade. 

"You fucking–"

“Girls? What’s with all the ruckus?” Eli’s mother says through the door. 

Silvana’s anger freezes, and she freezes with it. 

“Uuuuh, nothing! We were just– arguing about something,” says Eli in the most unconvincing voice Silvana has ever heard. 

“If you’re sure!” Irunú answers. “There are some leftovers for both of you in the fridge. And Silvana, please remember to not go to sleep too late!”

“Uh, yes, Miss Fince.”

“Don’t be so formal, Silvana, the name’s Irunú!”

“Yes, Miss Irunú,” says Silvana and then winces at how patronizing and defiant it sounded. 

Instead of scolding her, Irunú laughs through the door. “Very well then, have a good night you two!”

Silvana lets out a sigh of relief while Eli pitches backward onto the bed like a Victorian lady upon a fainting couch. 

“That was waaayyyyy too close,” Eli says, one hand on her chest.

‘No thanks to _you_ ’ Silvana wants to say, but instead she takes that comment and ruthlessly squashes it into the back of her mind, just like she always does. 

(She can _feel_ the entity living in the back of her mind grinning, razor-sharp teeth bared with hunger.)

“...We should finish this and go to sleep,” says Silvana, exhaustion slamming into her. 

They both awkwardly pick up their things, a silent undercurrent of tension running through them. Silvana keeps grinding her teeth, trying to keep the anger at bay as she goes through her nighttime routine, breathing in and out and in and out. 

She curls up in her bed, and drifts off to a restless sleep.

* * *

Operation Find Fae Friends, F3 for short, is a go from the moment Eli wakes up the next day. 

Her arm hurts like fucking hell the entire day, which is the first major hurdle to her mission, but she fights it bravely. It’s also kind of pathetic that she’s only asked twice about her arm, one by her mom and the other by Claudia the lunch lady/her best friend. 

Silvana had kind of hit a nerve when she’d said Eli didn't have many friends. Barely any, if she’s honest.

Plan F3! Focus, dammit!

Okay, so. 

The plan involves finishing her homework and projects as fast as she can (difficult, but doable), so she has more time to follow/stalk Silvana around. Step two of the plan is searching Silvana’s face for signs of the strange things she now sees so she can meet a new fae. 

Despite everything she said before, Eli’s terrified of going back to Wick the spider fae, so asking for another game is a last resort if step two is too difficult. 

That said, F3 is a lot more difficult that Eli anticipated. Her attention span is short on a good day and trying to force herself to concentrate when her brain _really_ doesn’t want to leaves her resorting to slamming back packets of Nerds and coffee so she can focus.

The other part of the plan doesn’t go much better. Silvana seems to think that this is Eli’s way of making sure she doesn’t flip out and kill anyone, which… Eli feels kinda bad that that’s not actually her goal? But not much, if she’s honest. That’s just a bandaid over a bullet wound, not like her actual plan which is a guaranteed solution! Or at least she hopes it is.

Following Silvana around is not very entertaining, and it kinda sucks to be honest since she keeps giving her a bunch of cold looks. But! Silvana is not very good at masking her emotions or her surprise. 

Still doesn’t make it any easier to find another fae realm. The first time Silvana seems to notice something magical, it turns out to be a random book about Julie d’Aubigny, whoever that is. 

The second one Eli spent _hours_ trying to find whatever it was Silvana spotted and got kicked out of a bakery. At least she found a few cute buttons lying on the sidewalk. 

The third one! Was not the lucky one. It was just somebody wearing a jean robe. That guy has Eli’s deep admiration and respect. 

The fourth one is the lucky one!

Silvana actually drops the thermos of disgusting “healthy” smoothie she’s drinking and stares at the corner of a church. It’s just the plain old corner of a brick church inside the university campus, almost always empty. 

She waits until Silvana has picked up her thermos and power-walked away to enter the little chapel. It’s dusty in that corner, and dark since there are few and small windows. Eli takes a second to peek at Jesus in his cross and mentally apologize for entering his house without being invited, and she touches the corner Silvana was staring at.

Brick. It’s just dusty old brick, at a 90-degree angle. So she pats the corner up and down and nearby and the only thing she manages to do is get a sneezing fit. So she leaves the little church in a tizzy and goes back home. 

The next morning she walks back to campus, head held high and running through scenarios in her mind. She buys herself a donut on the way because she deserves it. 

When she arrives, she’s surprised to find that the church is… not full, but there are people and a pastor inside. Right, today’s Sunday. She’s kind of a dumbass for forgetting that, isn’t she?

No matter! Eli just waits outside on a bench until the service is over by taking out a pen and doodling all over her jeans. Some people (not many, maybe three) stop to compliment her work and ask a few questions, but it’s pretty uneventful all in all.

She manages to wrench herself away from her doodling a good two and a half hours later, when the pastor is presumably leaving to go for lunch. 

She seizes her opportunity and goes into the chapel. She walks by the pews and heads for the little corner. She pats down the corner again, but nothing happens. So, she thinks back to Silvana's reaction and Eli snaps her eyes open when she remembers Silvana's line of sight. 

Silvana was looking through a window at the corner, but what she saw could have been anywhere between those two places! It could be on the window!

Eli dodges pews and a few vases so she can inspect the window closely. She runs her fingers over the dusty window-pane and around the metal bars protecting it. She even heads outside and does the same from the other side, but nothing happens besides getting her fingertips all dirty.

But she's not going to give up! 

She heads back inside, splaying her hands and waving them around as if she was blind, trying to find whatever Silvana saw. That's when she feels it. A tingle on her fingertips, something that she would have dismissed if she wasn't looking for it. 

Concentrating on that point Eli closes her eyes trying to grasp it, to be enveloped by it, like she was last time. She remembers how it seemed to pulse with power and swallowed her whole until she was in a world so utterly foreign, so logic-defying, that not even her wildest dreams could have begun to describe it. 

The tingle gets stronger, almost electric, and she opens her eyes. She sees flickers of a stream of some golden liquid doing loops in the air around flashes of something off-white in the center. 

She smiles as she's enveloped by a storm of parchment and golden beads. 

* * *

Silvana breathes in and out in the middle of a park, a little ways from campus, trying to calm her shaking fists. She can't. She's scrambling to keep her composure, trying to keep the anger buried, but a scream keeps climbing up her throat, threatening to break free. 

All it took was a less-than-stellar grade to break her composure, to snarl at herself with insults and you-should-haves.

Her control cracks and she punches a tree, cracking it neatly in half and felling it with a thunderous crash. 

Alarmed shouts come from somewhere nearby and Silvana instinctively bolts, running down the slight hill, trying not to trip on roots, or rocks, or random stoners.

She bursts from the treeline into the busy side-walk, and she takes a second to breathe.

{ _Weak_ }

"Shut up!" Silvana hisses to the voice in her head. She only gets a mental laugh and a few odd looks in return. She shakes her head and runs towards the nearest university building, slipping away into the woman's toilets.

She sits inside the metal stall over the plastic cover, hands tugging through her hair, breathing, trying not to cry. 

She quietly admits to herself that Eli was right. She can't go on like this, she isn’t anywhere near strong enough to keep this– this _demon_ inside herself at bay. 

But trying to find another fae and go through something similar or _worse_ than what she went through with the spider fae or... or something like what happened with Jacobo–

She stifles a sob. She _can't_. She can't! 

She can't keep living like this, but the other option is almost certain death so what else is there?

Her phone rings, startling her out of her funk. She fumbles for the little ringing device, and frowns when she sees the caller ID state "unknown number."

"Hello?" 

"Hi Silvana, it's uh, it's me!"

"...Eli? Why– What's going on?"

"So! I may or may not have found another fae realm by spying on you–please don't be mad– and I entered it and I'm stuck!"

Silvana releases a sharp breath, trying to put her annoyance down, to stifle her fear.

"Okay, I'll come. Where– where are you?"

"It's kind of complicated."

"Eli, I'll only say this once again. _Where are you?_ "

"In Belgium, I think."

"...what?!?"


	6. Chapter 6

Eli awkwardly smiles at the woman who’d she’d borrowed the phone from while Silvana rages at her from the tiny speaker. The woman smiles back, absolutely oblivious to the expensive international call Eli’s making. 

“ _Good? Call good_?” the woman says in heavily-accented English. 

“ _Yes, thank you!_ ” Eli lies, in equally shitty English, before switching to Spanish to say into the phone: “Silvana, please! I don’t wanna get stuck half-way across the world! What the hell would I tell my mother?!?” 

“You dim-witted– Fine! Tell me what you did!” snaps Silvana. 

Eli tells what she did, trying desperately to stay focused because the woman’s polite smile is turning strained the longer she talks. 

“Done?” the woman says and Eli shakes her head with an apologetic grimace.

“Silvieeee, please hurry upppp!” 

“I am at the university! You will wait!”

“Please no more!” the woman says, starting to frown. 

“Pleaseeeee this woman is starting to talk mean at meeeeeee.”

“It is not my problem _you_ decided to be a reckless–” the call cuts off abruptly and Eli blinks before shoving the phone back into the woman's arms and stammering out a “Thank you!” and running back to the place she first emerged from. 

She runs through cobblestone streets and picturesque houses that look straight out of that city in the book _Heidi_. The snatches of foreign conversations and the sounds of a small town envelop Eli, and she realizes that a) this is _so_ much different from the endless din of her huge city and b) this is the first time in her life she’s ever been out of said city. 

The old-looking bridge still hangs over the slowly running stream and she doesn’t hesitate to wade into it, her baggy black pants soaking up water like a sponge. She hangs out underneath it, smiling at the people passing by giving her odd looks.

Then Silvana pops out from the bridge and splashes into the water. Her pristine dark-blue pencil skirt gets dipped into the muck and Silvana screws up her face. 

“Fucking hell, finally!” says Eli and splashes over to her, accidentally spraying her white blouse with mud. Oooops. “I have no idea why I couldn’t find that spot!”

Silvana turns around and examines the spot on the underside of the bridge, the old yellowed bricks covered in moss, before she touches the wall in a very deliberate way. “No wonder you couldn’t go back. It has… a sort of lock? It’s difficult to explain. The golden beads floating around the parchment rose had roman numerals on them. I just tapped them in order and the rose bloomed. So I think we can go back now.”

“It was that easy?!?” Eli laments, groaning. 

“You can’t see this, can you?” Silvana says, pointing at the wall. “So unless you were incredibly lucky you wouldn’t touch the beads in the right order.”

“Urgh, let’s just get back!” Eli says and touches the wall. She’s swallowed by the mess of parchment petals and levitating beads once again and she lands back into the realm.

The corridor is made of old, corroded stone like that of an old castle, only it had a brownish-yellow tinge. The walls are encrusted with golden beads forming strange patterns that moved so slowly that if you weren’t paying attention you’d never notice it.

Silvana lands beside her with soft footsteps, her hand immediately going to rest on the left wall. “So now we go back. At least you did something smart.” 

“I would have been screwed if I hadn’t used the keep-your-hand-on-the-right-wall trick for getting through mazes,” Eli admits, her hand tapping nervously on her leg. “So, uh. How are you?”

Awkwardness mercilessly descends on top of them. Eli’s fidgeting gets even worse, reaching up to tug at her hair.

“Are you still mad at me?”

“Yes,” Silvana simply responds, walking forward at a faster pace. “You continue doing these– reckless, utterly senseless things. Why do you want to know these creatures? They are dangerous. They killed Patches and the only friend I had in the past year. They almost tore your arm out of its socket. Why?”

“... I guess I just–” Eli stops walking and searches for words in the jumble of her mind. “This is kind of exciting, you know? Magic! Fae! Impossible secret dimensions! We’ve discovered this, nobody else. Aren’t you curious?”

“No,” responds Silvana. “I want to go back to what my life was before.”

“Well I don’t,” answers Eli. “This is much more exciting than my life was! I don’t want to go back to normal.”

Silence descends over them in the shadowy tunnel they’re in, the little golden beads giving off a faint light that casts soft shadows on Silvana’s face. Her grey eyes are narrowed at the ground and she’s biting her lip, her subtle pink lipstick rubbing off to reveal chapped lips. 

“Alright,” she says, coming to a decision. She sweeps one of the strands of her black hair behind her ear and straightens up. “I will help you.”

“Really?!?” Eli says, her eyes widening and her smile bursting to life in her face. 

“Yes. Until I find a cure for the possession,” Silvana acquiesces.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” says Eli and surges to wrap Silvana into a hug. Silvana goes tense in her arms, like a rather short plank, and awkwardly pat her back until Eli lets go. 

“C’mon, we should explore right now!” Eli says, bouncing with excitement. “This place is _huge!_ I saw a lot of tunnels and the fae could be in one of them!”

“Have you seen what I look like?!?” she says, gesturing to her I’m-going-to-an-interview skirt and blouse, complete with black heels.

"It's a Saturday and we don't have any classes, why the hell would you dress like that?" asks Eli, genuinely curious. 

"Because I still have to be conscious of my image," Silvana snaps, before she smooths down her hair. "Besides, we could get lost and end up in the middle of Russia for all we know."

"Alriiiiiiiight," groans Eli, starting to walk again. "So we come back here on Tuesday?"

"I have Accounting on Tuesday at 2 pm," informs Silvana, pulling out her phone and waking it up, her lock screen displaying her schedule. 

"Then... on Thursday? After lunch? I only have class in the morning there."

"That works," answers Silvana, pocketing her phone. 

Their steps echo in the corridor in the ensuing silence.

"We should plan this next excursion," Silvana suddenly says, drawing a pen from her pocket and holding it in her hand. "At least we should wear attire that is a little more... according to our situation."

"Hey! I'm wearing my workout outfit!"

"A workout outfit isn't going to protect you from one of those creatures," states Silvana. 

"Uuuuuugh, fineeeee."

* * *

The day of the incursion has Silvana frantically checking and double-checking all her provisions. 

She has packed a light backpack with some food, water and a change of clothes. She has some money, and she even dared to change a bit of it for dollars, just in case they end up in another foreign country. 

Aside from that, she tried to wrap her hands like a boxer, following a Youtube tutorial, because she has a feeling if things go wrong again she'll go berserker and bust her knuckles more than they already are. 

She sighs and slings her backpack onto her shoulders and stands up. Eli finally steps out of the bathroom with her "war outfit" that she'd been working on, which mostly consists of repainted protective gear that she'd used to learn how to skateboard and then forgot about. They're clearly too small for her, but repainted to look like some sort of knight's armor. "Alright, let's do this!" 

She strides across the room and picks up a baseball bat, swinging it a few times as if it was a sword before getting a string and tying the end of the bat to her belt. 

"...Tell me you're not seriously considering to enter a chapel with a _bat_ ," says Silvana, a long-suffering tone to her voice. 

"Why not?" she asks, _genuinely confused_ and Silvana digs her face into her hands. 

"Dear god, we are doomed," she mumbles before taking a steadying breath. "People might think your intentions are not benign if they see you enter with painted skateboarding gear and a _bat_."

"Huh?"

"They'll think you're going to break things."

"Ah," Eli says, as if realizing that incredibly obvious fact just right then. "Fuck."

"You know what?" Silvana says with a sigh. "Put on a skirt, a long one that has a little bit of flare, over your pants, along with a jacket over your shirt and you should be able to hide the bat under it if you are careful." 

"Right! I have a belt somewhere that I think I can use to hang it with– I'll be right back!" She says and scampers off. 

Silvana sighs and instead goes back to watching the window for signs that Eli's mother, Irunú, might come back early and catch them in this highly nonsensical endeavor that could be misconstrued as both of them trying to run away. She does _not_ want to try and lie her way out of that.

"Now I'm ready!" Eli finally says, emerging from the bathroom. The long skirt coupled with the fluffy-looking winter jacket is rather unfashionable but that's better than blatantly suspicious. 

"Let's go..." mumbles Silvana. She stands up and walks over to the door. 

The entire walk over to the chapel in the university is nerve-wracking. Eli keeps chattering away a mile a minute but Silvana hears nothing at all. She's so scared her hands are trembling. She thought the second time would be easier, but she finds that an untruth since this time she doesn't have the rage to drive her forward and blind her to all doubts. 

She's going to be sick. 

The chapel gets closer and closer and Silvana begins to drown in dread.

{I can help with that} the creature in her mind says, a smug tone to its voice. Silvana has the impression of sharp teeth and flowing blood and rotting flesh. 

"Don't you dare," grinds out Silvana, storming into the chapel.

There's nobody in the old, small chapel and Silvana heads straight towards the parchment rose. 

She is still in front of it. The rose blooms continually, more and more petals delicately flowing. The beads circle and move in orbits yet always present a connected appearance, like a threadless rosary. 

It's beautiful. 

Silvana wants to break it.

"I'm here! Jeez, you run fast," says Eli stumbling into the chapel. "You found it?" 

Silvana nods wordlessly. 

"Cool! Let's do this!" Eli says. 

Silvana looks at Eli's excited, utterly fearless face and before she can register what she's doing she has one hand on Eli's shoulder and the other touches the rose. 

Suddenly the petals of the rose are torn off and begin enveloping them, drawing into the flower’s core, a spiralling thread of molten gold. They’re thrown into it and surface in the same corridor of last time.

The air is musty, suffocating, with a faint sweet aroma of rot. The walls, floor and ceiling are made of cream-colored limestone, corroded and sporting chinks in places. Golden beads appear to float through the stone, surfacing and sinking, bobbing along in different directions, serving as the only light source in the place, shining a soft yellow light.

"We're back here!!! Oh–" Eli says before pulling a stick of chalk from her pockets and she marks the nearest wall with a big red circle. “Now we won’t get lost!”

“Right,” nods Silvana, taking off her backpack and rummaging in it. She finds the torchlight she’d packed in there. From the corner of her eyes, she sees Eli taking off her skirt and opening the fluffy jacket, swinging the now visible bat in its makeshift holster every time she turns. 

“Alright let’s go!”

They set out down the corridor, walking along identical walls. The first thing Silvana notices now that she isn't half out of herself with rage is that their footsteps don't make noise. At all.

"...Eli?"

"Yeah?" she says, looking up from marking the walls with arrows so they won’t get lost. 

"Could you walk ahead, but keep talking? I want to test something."

"Sure! I can do that," Eli says and she starts talking about... color theory? At least that's what Silvana thinks it's about. 

Eli keeps walking, her words bouncing all over the walls, drawing on the walls to mark their way back, and then she rounds the corner and the sound just stops.

A bolt of panic lances through Silvana so sudden it feels like a spasm, before she's bolting down the hall screaming at herself for being so _stupid_ for leaving her alone.

A surge of power rushes through her and she bounds forward and she rounds the corner and–

"–and I thought about using a tertiary palette but I don't know if I could limit myself to three colors– Hey Silvana, is something wrong?" 

Silvana stands heaving, looking at Eli incredulously.

{Well, now. Aren't you stupid for being scared?}

A scream tears from Silvana's throat and she punches the wall. The stone breaks like drywall, dust and pebbles flying in all directions. It makes her even angrier that it wasn't satisfying to break at all. She needs to destroy something, to tear something apart–

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, Silvana what the fuck?!?" Eli says, taking a step backward and raising her bat. "What happened?!?"

Silvana turns and only sees somebody ready to attack and lunges towards her.

"Fuck no!" Eli says and swings her bat. Silvana has enough time to lash out at the bat, catching it in her hand painlessly. She yanks it away from Eli and that sends her tumbling to the ground, the protective gear scraping along the stone.

"Not again!" says Eli and stumbles to her feet and bolts down the corridor, her steps completely silent. 

Silvana rears back and throws the bat at Eli as hard as she can, but she's always had shit aim and the bat streaks past her head and lodges itself in the wall and– falls through the wall. What.

The surprise is enough to shake Silvana out of her rage and her knees give out on her. She collapses on the ground, grabbing fistfuls of her hair and pulling to distract her, breathing through the buzz in her mind, her hands still shaking. 

She greedily gulps air, trying to shove her emotions back into the dark corner of her mind where they are normally held in, but they don't fit, like a fitted sheet that simply doesn't want to fold. 

A water bottle rolls to a stop near Silvana and she nearly jumps out of her skin because she hadn't heard it at all. 

"Uuuh, that's for you," says Eli, peeking out from the corner of the corridor. "You should drink water because that apparently helps to calm down? At least according to Yahoo Answers. So, yeah."

Silvana nods and grabs the bottle, trying her best not to spill it, and she takes a few gulps. As soon as she's marginally calmer she's hit with a wave of nothingness, a wave of hollow exhaustion. 

It's almost scary how the hollowness is starting to be familiar.

"Eli, you can come back. I calmed down."

"Phew!" she says, rounding the corner and practically bouncing back to Silvana's side. "That was scary. I'm suuuuuuuper relieved the water trick worked!"

"I don't think the water was what calmed me down," answers Silvana, struggling to her feet. She feels like she'd just ran a marathon and at the end she’d found out her cat died. 

“I’ll try to get the bat out of the wall!” sing-songs Eli before skipping away.

She starts tugging at it, then the bat suddenly gives and wrenches out of the wall. Eli didn’t expect that and fell backwards, ending up sprawled on the floor. It looks comical enough that if Silvana wasn’t so hollow, she’d have smiled.

“Fuck. Ow,” Eli says, standing up and dusting off nonexistent lint. She then twirls the bat like a baton and lays it on her shoulder. “Mission complete!”

Silvana then stops listening to her, because she notices that the hole the bat left, part of it looks as if it broke _through_ the wall. 

"Earth to Silvana! What are you– Oh! Cool!" Eli finally notices the hole and runs up to it, trying to peek through. "It's kinda dark outside! Maybe it just looks out into a black wall? Or, wait– what the fuck?!? Is this in space?!?"

Silvana stands up on legs as shaky as a newborn fawn's and takes a second to steady herself before running over to the hole. She peeks through it and it takes a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but as soon as they do, she notices a corridor going downwards in the distance, and another parallel to it farther away, and another and another until her eyes can't perceive anymore.

"It can't be space, if it was we'd have died due to lack of oxygen already," states Silvana, taking a step back and placing a hand on top of the hole, noting the lack of vacuum trying to pull it out. 

"We should make the hole wider!" says Eli, immediately trying to pry out chunks from the stone. "We could try to get a look at this maze from the outside!"

"Right."

The stone proves harder than it looks and they only manage to dislodge chunks that were already half-broken from Silvana's prior outburst. 

"This is getting nowhere!" whines Eli, trying to use the bat as a crowbar and failing. "You know what? You should go all rage-y again!"

"Are you insane?!?" asks Silvana, whirling around to glare at Eli. 

"What? You get like, super-strength when you go rage-mode, so you could make the hole wider in a lickety-split!"

"Yes, and I could kill you just as easy! Did you not see what happened merely a few minutes ago?" snaps back Silvana, crossing her arms. 

"Yeah, but! The hole! We're never gonna get it open at this pace," Eli responds, wildly gesticulating at the crumbling part of the wall. 

"Allow me to repeat: I. Could. Kill. You."

"Honestly, you're scared of that more than I am," answers Eli dismissively.

"... I think I'm beginning to notice that, yes," says Silvana, frowning. "Are you as fearless as you seem?"

"It's weird?" answers Eli, tapping her foot on the ground. "Like, I don't really get scared _before_ something happens? Like, when I was like, 14 I decided to set my curtains on fire and I wasn't scared of what could happen until they were like, already burning a hole in the ceiling."

"What in the world have I gotten myself into?" mumbles Silvana disbelievingly. "Nevermind that, I'm not going to–"

{I can help you}

Silvana stops in her tracks. It's the first time the... fae has said anything that isn't insulting. 

{Since you can't do anything about that hole, I can lend you my strength}

_That’s a trap_ , thinks Silvana pointedly, frowning before shaking her head. 

{It’s a _deal_ , not a trap} the fae responds, a bubbling short laugh following his words. {How about this; your anger, in exchange for strength to widen the hole.}

_So I won’t harm Eli?_

{Not unless you wish to}

Silvana wants to say no, but Eli is still talking, trying to convince her to do just that. And they’ve walked a long time and found nothing. She wants to get rid of the fae possessing her, the sooner the better. That’s what decides it.

“Alright then,” Silvana says, walking over to set herself in front of the hole and adopt a boxing stance straight out of the movies. “Then I accept that deal.”

She sees red, the anger rising inside her throat like acid and she roars. She punches the wall, cracking it each time, chunks and dust flying.Then as fast as it came, it’s gone, and she collapses on the jagged edges of the widened hole. The points of the rocks dig into her skin and she pulls away on instinct, but her legs give out.

Eli’s arms are suddenly around her, holding her up. “Just in time!” Eli cheers, before gently lowering her to the ground until Silvana’s sitting on it. “How’re you feeling?”

“...I’m getting used to the tiredness and emptiness after it,” Silvana informs, her voice emotionless. “It wasn’t as bad this time.”

“Oh, so you can get up?”

“I think so,” Silvana says, and stands back up on shaky legs. 

“Alright, let’s see what we’ve got!” Eli says and walks over to the hole. “Oh wow, these things go for miles!” 

Eli then tries to peek out her head out the hole and she immediately stumbles backwards. “I wasn’t expecting that! There’s like a force? That pushed me back?” She then sticks her head out again, but this time she manages to keep it out. “Oooh, this feels funky.”

Silvana doesn’t say anything, but instead cautiously holds her arm out the hole. Indeed there is a force pushing her back inside, it would be like fighting against a current of air but there’s no true tactile aspect involved in it. It’s almost like… gravity.

“Wait a second,” Silvana says, quickly picking up one of the rocks littering the ground. She then lightly throws out and to the left to the hole and then marvels when the rock “sticks” to the wall. “It’s modified gravity!”

“Omigosh that’s sooooo cool!” says before jumping out of the holling and rolling to the side of it before standing, which from Silvana’s perspective looks as if she’s walking on the outside of the wall. “Come on, we can see a lot from out here!”

Silvana doesn’t have the energy to argue so she gingerly steps out the hole and stands. She takes a second to let her mind adapt to the change of the wall suddenly becoming the floor. 

She then finally looks up. 

Tunnels stretch in all directions, stretching out into the darkness kilometers and kilometers ahead, empty space the only other thing in this realm. They could be trapped in there for _years_. 

Then she notices a faint light in the distance, a shining beacon in the darkness. It unfolds to be a planet of white stone, rivers of gold running on its surface, the size of a house. 

Silvana guesses that’s the way to go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well! A day late, but in my defense I was drowning in final exams. However, I am now free!!!! We are now getting close to meeting two very important characters I'm very excited to introduce!!!!


	7. Chapter 7

Eli runs along the outer wall of the corridors. She can see an intersection where three corridors combine and one of them runs the closest to the levitating stone planet. 

She finally finds her way to the intersection of the corridors and skids to a stop. A few steps later, Silvana stops by her side. From their point of view (and point of gravity) the intersection is a set of steep ramps running up in a Y shape. 

Both of them glance at each other and nod. Eli carefully steps on it, bracing for the shift of gravity. She adjusts to the change in perspective before Silvana imitates her, and both of them break into another run. 

The closer she gets to the floating planet, the more details stand out. The entire surface is covered in crystal outcroppings, crevasses running into the earth here and there. The rivers of gold all run into the cracks, making shimmering waterfalls that sink below the surface. 

Eli desperately wants to make a three-dimensional sculpture of it, or at the very least sketch it. 

Both of them jog to a stop at the nearest point to the planet, looking at it overhead. It’s still at least a school bus’s length away from them. 

“What do we do now?” muses Silvana, breathing heavily. 

Eli, makes a considering noise and then puts her hands around her mouth and shouts: “HELLO?!? ANYBODY HERE?!?” 

“What are you doing?” whisper-yells Silvana and clutches at Eli’s arm, dragging them both to the ground. “You’re attracting attention!”

“That’s the point,” Eli responds. “HELLO?!? IF YOU’RE HERE WE’D LIKE TO TALK– hmmph!”

Silvana claps a hand over Eli’s mouth and she squirms trying to get the hand off her mouth. Eventually, she licks Silvana’s hand and she lets go, a disgusted grimace on her face. 

Then the planet begins to move the cracks widening. The planet unfurls into a creature resembling a hedgehog, the white crystals rippling and extending into quill-like constructs. However, its limbs are too long, its snout too square for a hedgehog, its shape looking closer to that of a hare. The rivers of gold run backward to their source until they coalesce into tranquil lakes on the creature’s face, just like eyes. Geysers of gold sprout from its extremities, coming to form its claws. The source of the rivers is right in the middle of its forehead, where they spring to life in three distinct spouts, curling back into the creature's quills where they crash and disappear under them. What would be a hedgehog’s soft inner fur seems to be a field of parchment paper. 

It faces both of them, its unblinking, golden eyes resting on both of them. 

“Greetings,” it says, without opening its mouth. “What is it that you seek in my realm, little humans?”

Eli flounders with her words, struck speechless by the beautiful fae. 

“We came here for answers if you would be willing to provide them,” interjects Silvana, her tone measured and hitting the perfect balance between firm and respectful. 

Now that Silvana’s not raging out, Eli can see in her the elegance and poise of a queen as she greets the creature, face stern but open. 

“I would,” the creature responds, its claws gently placing themselves on each side of Eli and Silvana, boxing them in. “For a price.”

“One I’m sure we could negotiate,” acquiesces Silvana, an assured smile on her face. “What may I call you, and what pronouns would you prefer I use?”

The fae smiles with its eyes. “Call me, Inkuire. And I have been referred to as she for many, many years.”

"It is a pleasure to meet you, Inkuire," Silvana responds, doing a picture-perfect curtsy. "You can refer to us as Silvana and Eli."

Inkuire doesn't respond beyond a nod. 

Silvana takes a deep breath. "Our question refers to, how do I stop an unwilling possession?" 

"I see, that is certainly a plight, young one," the fae answers, one of its claws gently tapping Silvana in the head. 

Silvana freezes up for a split second, but then resumes her previous loose and confident posture. "Will you be able to help?"

"I can certainly point you in the right direction," Inkuire acquiesces. "How exactly to stop an unwilling possession is a secret heavily guarded by Epoche"

"Epoche?" Eli asks before she can stop herself and then she slaps a hand over her mouth at the dirty looks Silvana throws at her. 

"...Oh dear, you have much to learn!" says the fae, utterly delighted. "If this is the state of matters, I believe it would be most beneficial if instead of a deal, we enter a pact." 

"If I may inquire without a price," Silvana interjects. "What entails a pact?"

"Nothing is without a price," says the fae, it's maw opening to reveal a row of pristine, golden, wolf-like teeth. "Offer something in return."

"Your teeth are _amazing_ ," says Eli, stepping closer to the fae and standing on her tiptoes to get closer to them.

"You are a strange human, are you not?" Inkuire says, closing her mouth and nearing the tip of where her nose should be to Eli's face.

"I'm strange as fuck!" agrees Eli, extending a hand to put on Inkuire’s snout and pet it.

The fae laughs and backs up slightly. "Well, it seems a different approach is needed! How about a small deal? I'll tell you what a pact is, and in exchange, you'll both tell me your weaknesses."

Silvana clamps up, pursing her lips and looking thoroughly vexed at the idea.

"Oh! That's easy!" Eli says, spinning in place. "I'm shit at concentrating. Like really bad, unless in _very_ specific things. Math doesn't like me. My reading comprehension is pretty bad. Ummm, what else? People! People get tired of me easily and I don't know why. Also I do a lot of bad decisions. So yeah."

Silvana just sighs. "I am... not, good at keeping my emotions in check. And I can't draw, or sing, or do anything artistic besides playing the violin."

"She's really good at that!" Eli says brightly. "You should hear her she's sooooo good."

"I have never been athletic or strong, physically," continues Silvana, ignoring Eli entirely, which is _rude._ "And I guess that is it."

"Nope!" says Eli. "You also suck at people."

"What?" Silvana says, looking offended. "I'll have you know I am _very_ charismatic when I want to be. People like me."

"Yeah, sure," concedes Eli. "But you don't like people."

Silvana's mouth opens and closes like that of fishes. 

"So there! Our weaknesses!" says Eli, completely ignoring Silvana's quiet outrage. 

"Good, that is plenty of information," Inkuire says. "You've both made a Deal before, I assume?"

"Yes," confirms Sivana, her voice cold, side-eyeing Eli with a disgruntled face. 

"Then a Pact enables both parties to make Deals without having to negotiate every single aspect of them," the fae explains, the golden rivers changing courses to add emphasis to its words. "Think of it like opening a tab in a restaurant. You ask for what you desire and I give it, but if you ask for more than you can give you can make up for the difference at a later time without me having to forcibly take what you owe," Inkuire says sweetly.

"And if we take too much?" asks Silvana suspiciously. 

The fae laughs like chimes. "You can never take too much as long as you live."

"Cool!" Eli says, walking forward. "I don't know about grumpy face over there but I am 100% on board!"

"I don't think I have an alternative," Silvana sighs. "Yes, I will enter a Pact with you."

"So what'dya want?"

"For you to learn and grow," the fae answers. Then, her shifting, liquid claws lose their shape and spiral out like floating rivers that envelop both of them. 

Eli laughs with delight as she is lifted off the ground gently, held aloft by the fae. She hears Silvana shriek in terror beside her but doesn't mind her. She trusts Inkuire. She knows she's safe.

Inkuire's crown of golden rivers uncurl themselves, reaching and flowing in the air, extending into the darkness. The corridors of stone shatter, the pieces crumbling and floating like meteors in outer space. Then, the chunks of stone fly towards them, reforming into a platform underneath their feet, a floating island straight out of a Smash Bros stage.

Inkuire sets both of them on the platform, Eli jumping around in excitement while Silvana scrambles to stand as far away from the fae as she can. 

The rivers of gold ripple and then start to retract back, the edges of the space retracting with them. Eli's brain struggles to comprehend what she's seeing as the endless space becomes finite but somehow still endless, enforcing a boundary that she knows she somehow could walk around but never surpass. 

Inkuire smiles and suddenly shrinks, becoming tiny and more compact until she has the same height as Eli, so basically until she's slightly smaller than a horse. 

"I will provide now some of the answers you desire," Inkuire declares, sitting back on her haunches, looking like a huge, spiky magic wolf. "We fae are beings of magic; we are made of it, born from it, feed from it. Unfortunately, we ourselves cannot produce it. Humans don't produce it either, but they have the ability to gather the ambient magic and give it to us."

"That checks out," mumbles Silvana, her grey eyes coldly analyzing Inkuire.

"However, the transfer of magic from human to fae is quite tricky," she explains. "We cannot consume it unless it is given in the right form." 

Eli cocks her head like a lost puppy. 

“What it means is that your magic has to be tinged by the right _intention_ for me to be able to siphon it from you.” Inkuire clarifies, reaching over to pet Eli’s head. “And the intention I need is that of growth. Of bettering yourself and reaching new heights in knowledge and ability.”

“So we just learn?” asks Silvana, dumbfounded. “That’s it? No blood sacrifices, no fear, no firstborn child?”

“Are those myths still going around?” Inkuire says, cocking her head to the side. “No, we only require the right intention. If another fae needed the intention of causing suffering, then maybe. But I am a spirit of self-growth and both of you are here to do just that!”

She then strikes the rock with a gold-tipped paw and it sinks into it, before two mounds of boulders burst from the ground and rearrange themselves into vaguely humanoid figures. 

“First off, both of you need to learn how to channel fae magic!” Inkuire exclaims, standing on her four paws. “Silvana you’ll focus on learning how to work with Boile. And you Eli, you’ll be learning how to channel my magic, since you aren’t being possessed.”

“Wait, we came here for–” Silvana protests, outraged, before one of the rock constructs takes a swipe at it.

“That comes later! Now it is time to learn!”

* * *

Silvana stumbles to a stop, sweat pouring off of her, completely covered in dust. 

She’s been screaming so much her throat is sore, but she doesn’t care because that _damned_ construct keeps dodging all of the hits she throws at it and she stumbles and falls and gets up and she’s completely covered in damn dust!

That’s what pissess her off the most. When the rock thing strikes at her, it stops inches from her and instead lets out a poof of gold dust. She’s covered in gold dust and she _hates_ it. 

“Will you die already?!?” she screams and surges towards the thing in a reckless attack. 

It dodges and trips her up, and she rolls to a stop in the dirt before she gets back up again. 

“Silvana! The point of your exercise is to learn to dodge and get up again! Don’t attack!” Inkuire says before she calmly goes back to talking to Eli. 

Silvana screams and punches a hole straight into the floor before the construct releases a cloud of gold dust right in her face. 

* * *

“Magic pulses through everything,” says Inkuire in a soft, gentle voice. “From the tiniest grain of sand to the glorious sun in the sky. It is with practice and patience that you can learn to perceive it without the aid of another fae.”

Eli furrows her brow, holding her still as a tiny river of gold runs through and around them. 

“Feel my magic, perceive my magic. Focus on it as it moves and changes, grasp its unique nature.”

Eli’s brow furrows even further, a look of intense concentration on her face. 

“Do you feel it?”

“I feel… hungry.”

* * *

Eli’s head hurts from all her concentrating as she walks into her room after four hours straight of sitting trying to perceive whatever the hell Inkuire’s magic felt like. She collapses onto her bed with a groan.

Silvan collapses too but she looks like one of those actresses in old movies fainting on a fainting couch. She looks so pretty it's unfair.

Eli’s thoughts drift around and sharpen and soften into a lull of half-sleep until Silvana’s head lifts up from the bed. “She never told us about Epoche.”

“FUCK.”


	8. Chapter 8

Eli yawns in the packed Transmilenio, swinging with the turns it does. She wasn’t lucky enough to get one of the seats, so she stands while she travels to buy some art supplies; she needs to make at least fifteen clay lobsters. She does not have enough red paint to color them all.

She watches the scenery go by, brick walls splattered with graffiti, potholes dotting the street. When they hit the stoplight and get caught by the red light, a street performer comes to the front and juggles lit torches, sometimes breathing out plumes of fire. Eli smiles as the performer goes between the cars to grab the donations people offer him. 

The bus continues rolling on. 

Eli pulls out her phone, but then remembers she promised Inkuire she’d do something different. Pocketing her phone, Eli closes her eyes and breathes in deeply. She concentrates, keeping in mind how Inkuire’s magic felt, and then summons her own magic forward. 

At first, nothing happens. But then she gets glimpses, sensations, tastes of the magic suspended in the air. It moves, dances in different patterns, changing directions and rhythms as it travels through the air and into the metal, through the plastic of the seats and the heightened electricity of the lightbulbs. 

Inkuire had told her that with time, Eli and Silvana could develop their magic-sense to the point where they’d be able to accurately tell the material, movement, and temperature of objects kilometers away. Right now, Eli has to concentrate until her head hurts in order to even _feel_ magic in the first place.

Eli opens her eyes and realizes she’s missed her destination by three stops. Oops.

* * *

Silvana holds the baseball bat in front of her, glaring with all her might at the broken hunk of metal that used to be an old toaster. Her hands shake and drops of sweat make their way down her neck. 

She yells as she brings down the bat, denting the metal. Boile laughs with glee as the bat pings of the metal, barely making a dent. Silvana wrestles her anger and frustration, trying to feed it directly to Boile instead of letting it out into her swings. 

Her arms shake, burned red from the sun. She struggles to lift the bat, her weak muscles protesting every movement. 

She grits her teeth and swings down. The toaster bends in half, looking like a metal bowtie. Silvana screams and flings the bat into a nearby rusted car, where it ends up sticking out handle-first.

“Not again!” she shrieks, stomping her foot and looking at the toaster she utterly destroyed. 

She then turns around to find trash collectors staring at the mess, the bat, and the toaster. And of course, they’re also staring at her. 

She blinks, then yanks the bat out of the car and starts power-walking away, trying to find another metal thing to dent but not destroy. 

* * *

Irunú is not a fool. She knows something is up with her cuddlebug and it has to do with Silvana. 

Eli has always been a talkative girl, flitting about from topic to topic and enthusiastically telling her all about her day, even if Irunú is already half-asleep from a tiring work day. 

Lately, Eli’s begun to watch her words and avoiding talking to her and Irunú’s worried. She thought it was clear that no matter what Eli does or is, Irunú’s her mom and she’ll always love her. 

She doesn’t want to be a nosy mom, but if Eli and Silvana continue to come home late with new bruises and scrapes, lying about whatever they’re doing, she will take drastic measures. 

Nobody hurts her daughter. Nobody.

* * *

“–and I knew that inside that guy’s backpack there’s a truckload of rubber chickens! Why would somebody need that many rubber chickens? It’s wayyyyy excessive– Silvana are you listening?”

Silvana nods, but Eli can tell she’s thinking of something else, her eyes unfocused and far away, and she huffs. Instead Eli digs into her backpack and brings out her knitting. It’s a wonderfully white wooly mess that Eli can tell looks objectively terrible, but hey give her a break! It’s only yesterday that she started learning how to knit. 

Silvana suddenly blinks and Eli can tell with her magic-sense that Silvana has activated her own magic-perception power and is scanning around the bus. “I… thought somebody was following us.”

“You thought or Boile thought?” asks Eli, frowning at her knitting, tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth. 

“Boile, but I wanted to check,” answers Silvana, looking around. “I think he wanted me to panic, the irritating pest.”

“Please don’t punch a hole through the bus,” absentmindedly asks Eli, frowning at her knitting and then realizing she fucked up a stich three rows ago. “Goddamit, now I have to do that again!”

Silvana glances at what Eli’s doing, opens her mouth and then seems to reconsider. The vibration of magic leaves and Silvana rubs her head as if she has a headache. She probably does, all things considered. Boile is a fantastic fae for using up magic, storing it not so much, meaning that he goes everboard in about everything. 

“Nevermind that,” says Silvana, sighing. “Our stop is getting close, get up.”

Eli pouts but does as she’s told, stuffing her knitting back into the bag and shoving her way out of the packed bus. Nobody complains about being shoved, it’s the only way to get in or out of the bus. 

The university campus is deserted. Understandable since its a Sunday, so neither of them have to worry about being spotted doing random-ass movements inside a chapel. 

Silvana stops Eli by gripping her shoulders. “Please repeat our plan back to me,” Silvana says, a narrow-eyed gaze settling on Eli.

“So! You’re in charge of– unsticking? Was that the word?”

“Unbinding,” snaps Silvana.

“Sheesh, no need to get testy. Anyways! You unbind Inkuire’s Lair entrance from where it is, ‘cuz you can use magic and I can’t. I do the chalk circle where we’re going to place the new and improved, Inkuire Lair entrance!” Eli says, slipping into an infomercial presenter voice the longer she goes on. 

“Alright,” nods Silvana, used to Eli’s antics by now. “Start the chalk circle. I’ll start the unbinding.”

“On it!” cheers Eli and races off. She runs full speed past concrete buildings and carefully-tended gardens into the busy streetwalk outside of campus. She runs past the bus stop and the University library only to take a hard right and run up to the residential buildings beside the campus. 

The streets are maze-like and winding, deserted at this time in the morning, so finding the underpass is easy enough. It’s nothing special, just a set of stairs under an arch between two buildings, but that’s exactly why it’s perfect. Nodoby goes there, easy to disappear without anybody noticing!

“Okay, Eli! You can do this!” she says and takes a stick of chalk. She unfolds the reference picture and focuses on it. 

‘The most important step is to think of how my magic resonates,’ remembers Eli, Inkuire’s voice patiently explaining in her mind. ‘Remember it, imitate it. And then take the chalk and while drawing wish to learn and improve with all your being!’

Eli nods to herself and begins drawing the intricate circle. Drawing is one of the things Eli’s never had troubule concentrating on, mostly because she doesn’t need to concentrate. Her hands move on her own while her mind is free to go on tangents and knot trains of thought into bowties.

“Move,” says Silvana and Eli almost jumps a foot in the air, she clutches her chest and stands asive while Silvana waves her hands over the circle in a way that’s supposedly tying Inkuire’s Realm to the chalk. To Eli it looks as if Silvana’s practicing to be a mime.

“Done,” Silvana says, roughly shoving her striaght her out of her face. “Let’s test to see if it works. And finally get Inkuire to tell us what the hell Epoche is.”

"Right! Just let me open the Realm this time!" says Eli and Silvana stands aside, crossing her arms over her chest. 

Eli narrow her eyes at the chalk circle touching the wall with her hand. 

"You need to call out with your presence to Inkuire, so that she can open the Realm since humans can't externalize magic–"

"–without the help of a Fae. I knoooooow Silvana, I know," protests Eli, sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth. She just has to wave her own internal magic around and make enough of a ruckus for Inkuire to open the door. 

And Eli promptly finds herself inside a dusty stone corridor. She actually loses her balance and smacks her face into the wall. She's really glad Silvana's no there to see that. 

"YO! INKUIRE! I LANDED OVER HERE!" screams Eli into the dark of the corridor. 

The corridor begins rumbling and unfurling, the walls falling away to float in the empty space. Inkuire's white, quilled snout peeks out from the darknes and perches her giant golden claws on each side of the corridor, a lupine smile on her face.

"How wonderful! The relocation went without a hitch!" she says, satisfaction pouring out of her voice. "I know! I'm doing *actual magic!" Eli says with wonder in her voice. "It's so cool!"

"And this is only the start!" Inkuire says. "In no time you'll be speaking Sylvan, just you wait!"

"Sylvan?" asks Eli.

"The language of the Fae."

"The Fae have a language?!? That's so cool!" Eli exclaims, jumping around in glee, she then stops and considers. "I think Silvana will have an easier time learning it. She's suuuuper good at languages. Like, ridiculously good, she's already fluent in three and–"

"Oh! What a wonderful surprise," says Inkuire, turning to look behind Eli.

"Huh?" Eli looks around to see Silvana in a heap on the floor, trying to disentangle herself from– "Mom?!?"

Irunú finally gets free from the tangle of limbs, staring bug-eyed at where she is. She then turns around and levels Eli with her disappointed mom glare. "Eliana Marisol]! Explain to me what this is!"

"Uh oh."

"I'll gladly explain! For a price, of course," cheerfully says Inkuire, her grin growing.

"Absolutely not!" says Silvana, walking up to Irunú. "Please follow me. We'll go to one of the corridors that still has walls and roof. And don't touch anything!"

* * *

"So magic is real and so are fairies?"

"Fae, actually," corrects Silvana. "You're looking... strangely calm."

Irunú laughs, hugging Eli tighter. "I was born in La Guajira and raised Wayuú until I was twelve. To my tribe, spirits were real and important, part of everyday life. That never left me, not two and a half decades later."

"I was under the impression Fae had been forgotten!" says Inkurie, her gargantuan eye peeking out from the mouth of the corridor. 

"Not completely!" answers Eli, giggling. "This is so good Silvana! Now we won't have to sneak around mom!"

"It would help me achieve peace of mind, at the very least," answers Irunú. "I am relieved you weren't doing drugs or something like that."

"Ew, no," says Eli scrunching her nose up. 

"Eli," says Silvana, her face stony. "You have the coolest mom."

Eli blinks and then an ear to ear smile blossoms on her face. "I know right?!?"

"Oh, girls, stop it. You're gonna make me blush." 

"I could teach you alongside them!" offers Inkuire from outside.

"I won't be able to come as often as these two because of the restaurant, but sure," answers Irunú, smiling. 

"Marvelous!" Inkuire says, making the walls and the floor float away. "We'll begin right now!"

"No," states Silvana, leveling a red-stained glare at Inkuire. "You will tell us what Epoche is. You've been dodging the topic for almost two months, you don't get to delay it any longer!"

"Oh, alright, since you asked," Inkuire says, her front claws liquefying into streams of gold before flowing in between them, forming a perfect replica of planet Earth. 

"Before I and the other Fae were trapped in our Realms, human and Fae deals were commonplace

It was not common knowledge but within the right circles it was a thing of everyday life. However, deals outside those circles tended to go awry fast; Fae would... how do you humans call it? Oh, yes. They would 'take advantage' of human ignorance by letting them agree to Deals in which the human didn't know all the terms of. From our side? Humans used their ability to *lie* to trap Fae in horrible situations. This meant relationships between Fae and your people were always strained and suspicious, and bouts of violence between them a matter of when and where, not if.

Thus, a group of humans decided to create Epoche. They were a secret group with the self-assigned mission of protecting humans from Fae. 

Most of them were possessed and could use magic, fearsome warriors that could win a fight with their weapons as well as their words, forging Deals to keep the peace and breaking possessions gone wrong. 

I was a part of Epoche."

"So, you were part of the Fae Police?" asks Silvana, raising an eyebrow.

"In a sense, yes," nods Inkuire. "I was in charge of training recruits, and what a wonderful job that was..."

"Anyways!" continues Inkuire. "They were a world-wide organization, using interconnected Realm entrances to span the globe."

"Like how I got here in Bogotá and ended up getting out somewhere in Belgium!" says Eli, raising her hand as if she was still in school. 

"You need to tell me about *that later," says Irunú, poking Eli in the ribs, making her bark out a laugh and try to get away from the tickles. 

""However," continues Inkuire "The birthplace of Epoche, their main center of operations, was always Haití. If there is any hope of reclaiming the ritual to end a possession by force, even after all these centuries, it would have to be found there.

“However... '' Inkuire snarls, her quills unfurling and standing on edge. “I am led to believe… they wouldn’t be… welcoming anymore.”

“What do you mean?” asks Eli, a worried frown on her face.

“They are the only ones who could have done something like this. To trap all spirits in their Realms would require an inordinate amount of deals and hatred towards Fae and lies,” she snarls. “I don’t think they would be very pleased to know both of you were working with me. The standard protocol for people making Deals outside of the organization was to kill them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the day delay! But here it iiiiiiis!


End file.
